Accelerating the design of multilevel/hierarchical imprinted membranes for selective separation applications: A biomass-activated carbon/GO-based loading system

Abstract There has been plenty of attempts to engineer functional membranes with excellent comprehensive properties, figuring out how to both achieve excellent selectivity and permeation flux in one membrane is facing challenges. In this work, a subversive synthesis strategy with hierarchical structure was first proposed for the preparation of polymerization (PDA)-based activated carbon particles (ACPs)/GO nanocomposite imprinted membranes (P-AGNMs). A PDA-based imprinting process was initially performed on ACPs/GO surfaces to synthesize the PDA-based propranolol-imprinted sites, the P-AGNMs were then obtained through an innovative electrostatic spinning process. Based on the propranolol-imprinted PDA-ACPs/GO blended membrane structure, simultaneous benefits in both adsorption selectivity and permselectivity performance toward propranolol had been accomplished. Specifically, excellent rebinding capacity (54.9 mg g-1), fast adsorption kinetics and permselectivity coefficients (more that 3.5) could be easily obtained. Importantly, the optimized experimental results strongly suggested that the as-designed propranolol-imprinted sites from PDA-modified surfaces played crucial roles for obtaining increasing rebinding capacities of P-AGNMs. In addition, the as-prepared P-AGNMs were synthesized without complicated procedures and polluting the environment, which demonstrated that the as-designed synthesis methodology of P-AGNMs had great potential for applications in selective separation field.