Regenerated cellulose membranes for efficient separation of organic mixtures

Organic solvent nanofiltration (OSN) is a low-carbon technology for organic mixture separation that usually relies on non-renewable fossil-derived membranes. Cellulose, a biomass material with extensive sources and superior resistance to organic solvents, holds great promise in engineering OSN membranes. Here we studied the mass transport and separation properties of regenerated cellulose membranes (RCMs), which were made from wood pulp using ionic liquid as solvent by phase inversion method. By regulating membrane thickness from 150 μm to 350 μm, the solvent permeance and solute rejection can be finely tuned. The 350-μm-thick RCM membrane (RCM-350) displays better compaction resistance than the thinner ones and harvests high solute rejection with ethanol permeance reaching ∼ 30 L m−2 h−1 bar−1, outperforming the state-of-the-art polymeric membranes and showing long-term stability during cross-flow OSN. When used for solute separation, the RCM-350 membrane provides molecular selectivity of up to 294 and 68 for Alcian blue/Rifampicin and Alcian blue/Tetracycline mixtures, respectively, which depends on the mixture composition. Our findings reveal the potential of regenerated natural cellulose as a high-performance and sustainable alternative membrane material for separating organic mixtures.