High-performance electrocatalytic microfiltration CuO/Carbon membrane by facile dynamic electrodeposition for small-sized organic pollutants removal

Abstract Microfiltration exhibits advantage in wastewater treatment because of its higher permeability than ultrafiltration, nanofiltration and reverse osmosis. However, pollutants smaller than the membrane pores are difficult to be separated, resulting in a low removal efficiency. In this work, we fabricate a CuO/carbon membrane for small-sized organic pollutants removal by introducing electrocatalytic oxidation to microfiltration. In order to improve the electrocatalytic performance of membrane, a facile dynamic electrodeposition method is developed, by which CuO electrocatalysts are uniformly deposited on both the surface and pore walls of a coal-based carbon membrane. The prepared dynamic electrodeposited CuO/carbon membrane (DECuO/CM) has superior removal ability over the original carbon membrane (CM) and the conventional electrodeposited CuO/carbon membrane (CECuO/CM). The Rhodamine B (RhB), COD and TOC removal efficiencies of the DECuO/CM reach 99.96%, 71.82% and 64.29%, respectively, which are about 18.7-20.1 and 1.5-1.8 times higher than that of the CM and the CECuO/CM. Meanwhile, DECuO/CM shows higher permeability (823.03 L/(m2 h bar)) over CM (637.99 L/(m2 h bar)) and CECuO/CM (706.27 L/(m2 h bar)). Moreover, DECuO/CM has good sustainability because the RhB removal efficiency maintains above 93% after 5 repeated tests. The extensive applicability of the DECuO/CM is also proved with high removal efficiencies (all above 96%) when treating other three typical small-sized organic pollutants (phenol, bisphenol A and amoxicillin), respectively. Thus, the prepared DECuO/CM shows great potential for small-sized organic pollutants removal with both high permeability and removal efficiency. The dynamic electrodeposition is a promising approach to prepare high-performance electrocatalytic membranes for wastewater treatment.