Fabrication of Nanofiltration Hollow Fiber Membranes for Sustainable Pharmaceutical Manufacture

Abstract

This thesis explores the fabrication of nanofiltration (NF) hollow fiber membranes for sustainable pharmaceutical manufacture, especially in reducing waste, recycling valuable products and reusing water for pharmaceutical industry. Polyamide-imide (PAI) is employed to fabricate novel NF hollow fiber membranes. First, it was found that the water flux and solute rejections could be enhanced through elongation-induced nano-pore evolution during the dry-jet wet-spinning process. Then, the co-extrusion of PAI with conventional cellulose acetate (CA) was carried out to fabricate a novel PAI/CA dual-layer hollow fiber membrane, which could significantly lower the manufacture cost and improve membrane performance. After that, the membrane properties, including charge, hydrophilicity, pore size and pore size distribution, were controlled by hyperbranched polyethyleneimine (PEI) induced cross-linking and interfacial polymerization. This thesis demonstrate that PEI functionalized PAI NF membranes is promising for developing high performance NF hollow fiber membranes for various industrial applications.