Chemically modified polymeric filtration membranes for the selective elimination of active pharmaceutical ingredients from water

摘要

Poly(ether sulfone) (PES) filtration membranes were chemically modified by ultraviolet-assisted graft polymerization radical reactions using two monomers, namely acrylic acid (AA) and N-vinyl-2-pyrrolidone (NVP). The reaction kinetics was assessed by applying increasing irradiation durations keeping the monomer concentration constant, and the degree of substitution of the produced materials was monitored by attenuated total reflection-Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. The selective binding properties of the produced chemically modified membranes of a series of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), namely 4-acetamidophenol (APAP), ofloxacin (OFX), ciprofloxacin (CFX), tetracycline (TC), chloramphenicol (CHPH), (±)-propranolol (PRO) and diclofenac (DF) were evaluated by means of high-performance liquid chromatography. It was observed that native PES membranes showed specific elimination of some of the selected pharmaceuticals (i.e. PRO, OFX, CFX and DF), and this elimination was improved after chemical modification with AA (except for DF). After chemical modification by NVP, the binding properties were partially improved for several pharmaceuticals, namely TC, CHPH and PRO, and partially reduced for OFX and CFX. The selective elimination of PRO was significantly improved with both AA- and NVP-modified membranes. The reported results demonstrated that the chemical modification of PES filtration membranes allowed improving significantly their API retention properties.