Fabrication of high-capacity polyelectrolyte brush-grafted porous AAO-silica composite membrane via RAFT polymerization

July 28, 2017

Title

Fabrication of high-capacity polyelectrolyte brush-grafted porous AAO-silica composite membrane via RAFT polymerization

Author

Cunfeng Song, Meijie Wang, Xin Liu, He Wang, Xiaoling Chen, Lizong Dai

Year

2017

Journal

Materials Science and Engineering: C

Abstract

Surface-initiated reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) polymerization has been utilized to fabricate high-capacity strong anion-exchange (AEX) membrane for the separation of protein. By means of RAFT polymerization, quaternized poly(3-(methacrylamidomethyl)-pyridine) brushes formed 3-dimensional nanolayers on the surface of porous anodic aluminum oxide (AAO)-silica composite membrane. The surface properties of the membranes were analyzed by SEM, water contact angle, ATR-FTIR, XPS and TGA. To investigate the adsorption performance, the new AEX membranes were applied to recover a model protein, ovalbumin (OVA). High adsorption capacities of 95.8 mg/g membranes (static) and 65.3 mg/g membranes (dynamic) were obtained at ambient temperature. In the further studies, up to 90% of the adsorbed OVA was efficiently eluted by using phosphate buffer-1 M NaCl as elution medium. The successful separation of OVA with high purity from a mixture protein solution was also achieved by using the AEX membranes. The present study demonstrated that under mild reaction condition, RAFT polymerization can be used to fabricate ion-exchange membrane which has many remarkable features, such as high capacity and selectivity, easy elution and so on.

Instrument

J-810

Keywords

Circular dichroism, Secondary structure, Biochemistry