The preparation of electrically-enhanced and hydrophilic CNTs-PVDF composite hollow fiber membranes for fouling resistance

The anaerobic membrane bioreactor has great potentials to treat the wastewater with high organic matter due to the efficient anaerobic digestion process and high biomass retention. However, the existence of membrane fouling significantly increases the maintenance cost, and always requires frequent and complex cleaning process to recover the membrane performance. Thus, it is significant to fabricate a membrane with excellent anti-fouling performance for the application in membrane bioreactors. Herein, we prepared the CNTs-PVDF hollow fiber membrane with fouling resistance via loading the conductive CNTs coating on the surface of commercial PVDF membrane by a simple cross-linking reaction with hydrophilic polyvinyl alcohol and succinic acid. "Dual defense" was constructed by the combination of the hydrophilic surface and conductive CNTs coating, which lifted the anti-fouling performance of this membrane. In the assistance of electrical effect, the permeance of the membrane with −1.2 V bias could be recovered to 95 % of original state by simple hydraulic cleaning, while that of the membrane without bias was only 58 % after filtrating the sludge of 2000 mg/L. Furthermore, this membrane also exhibited the superior stability and fouling resistance in the operation of anaerobic electrochemical membrane bioreactor, which was promising for the advanced water treatment.