Tackling the wastewater challenge in polymer membrane manufacturing with a continuous adsorption process.

The effect of crosslinker, functional monomer and extraction on the long-term performance and degradation of molecularly imprinted polymers was investigated through adsorption studies, NMR, SEM, TGA and BET.

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It is well-known that solvent treatment and preconditioning play an important role in rejection and flux performance of membranes due to solvent-induced swelling and solvent adsorption. Investigations into the effect of solvent treatment are scarce and application specific, and were limited to a few solvents only. This study reveals the trend in solvent treatment based on solvent polarity in a systematic investigation with the aim to harness such effect for intensification of membrane processes. Nine solvents with polarity indices ranging from 0.1 to 5.8 (hexane to acetonitrile) were used as treatment and process solvents on commercial Borsig GMT-oNF-2, Evonik Duramem 300, and emerging tailor-made polybenzimidazole membranes. TGA-GCMS, HS-GC-FID, and NMR techniques were employed to better understand the effect of solvent treatment on the polymer matrix of membranes. In this work, apart from the solvent treatment's direct effect on the membrane performance, a subsequent indirect effect on the ultimate separation process was observed. Consequently, a pharmaceutical case study employing chlorhexidine disinfectant and antiseptic was used to demonstrate the effect of solvent treatment on the nanofiltration-based purification. It is shown that treatment of polybenzimidazole membranes with acetone resulted in a 25% increase in product recovery at 99% impurity removal. The cost of the process intensification is negligible in terms of solvent consumption, mass intensity, and processing time.

The present paper explores the complexation ability of methacrylic acid which is one of the most abundant functional monomer for the preparation of molecularly imprinted polymers. Host-guest interactions and the mechanism of complex formation between methacrylic acid and potentially genotoxic 1,3-diisopropylurea were investigated in the pre-polymerization solution featuring both experimental (NMR, IR) and in silico density functional theory (DFT) tools. The continuous variation method revealed the presence of higher-order complexes and the appearance of self-association which were both taken into account during the determination of the association constants. The quantum chemical calculations -performed at B3LYP 6-311++G(d,p) level with basis set superposition error (BSSE) corrections -are in agreement with the experimental observations, reaffirming the association constants and justifying the validity of computational investigation of such systems. Furthermore, natural bond orbital analysis was carried out to appraise the binding properties of the complexes.

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