A Comparative Study of Antibiotic Treatment by Different Charged Nanofiltration Membranes

Abstract

Antibiotics compounds are considered extremely harmful to humans due to the ecotoxicological effects. Nanofiltration (NF) is reportedly capable of removing antibiotics from pharmaceutical wastewater. The membranes are typically electrically charged due to the presence of carboxyl and amino groups. This study aims to evaluate the performance of negatively (nTFC), positively (pTFC), and dually (dTFC) charged NF membranes in antibiotic removal using ciprofloxacin (amphoteric), ofloxacin (negatively charged), tetracycline (amphoteric), amikacin (positively charged), and erythromycin (electro-neutral). The effects of various operation conditions on antibiotic removal were systematically evaluated. The dTFC membrane exhibited excellent removal efficiency (>97.0%) to all target antibiotics. When treating amphoteric antibiotics, the solution pH had a great influence on the removal efficiency of the nTFC and pTFC membranes. As for the dTFC membrane, the solution pH had less effect due to its dually charged nature. The results demonstrated that the dTFC membrane was more efficient than the other two TFC membranes, which possesses great potential in the field of pharmaceutical wastewater treatment. It is anticipated that our work provides a good example of the selection of nanofiltration membranes when treating antibiotics.

Keywords: NF membrane, antibiotic removal, charged TFC membrane, pharmaceutical wastewater treatment