Effect of Solvent Evaporation Time of Polysulfone Incorporated Copper Oxide Nanoparticles Incorporated Polysulfone Ultrafiltration Membrane on Protein Removal

Polysulfone (PSf) membranes are becoming more popular in wastewater treatment recently, mostly due to its stability in chemical, thermal and mechanical properties. PSf membranes are hydrophobic, causing difficulty of water permeation. Incorporating metal oxide nanoparticles improving the membrane hydrophilicity, thus increasing membrane permeation and rejection. In this study, copper oxide nanoparticle (CuO NPs) incorporated PSf membranes were fabricated under different evaporation times of 3s, 6s, 8s, and 9s to investigate on membrane morphology and performance. The membrane morphologies were characterized by using scanning electron microscope (SEM) while the membrane performance was determined through pure water flux (PWF) and bovine serum albumin (BSA) rejection. When characterized by SEM, all membranes showed an asymmetric structure with thin and dense at the top while the bottom layer was thick and porous. It was discovered that as the evaporation time increased, the formation of the finger-like structure became narrower while dense layer became thicker. When tested with PWF, membranes with higher evaporation times showed less permeability, decreasing from 139.74 Lm^-2h^-1 to 89.89 Lm^-2h^-1. In terms of BSA rejection, increased in evaporation time caused the rejection rate to increase from 87.79% to 92.15%. This study proved that evaporation time is one of important parameters that influences the membrane performance significantly.