Inorganic nanophotocatalysts have high efficiency in the deep treatment of organic wastewater. However, nanocatalysts are often prone to loss and require additional recycling, which limits their wide application. In this work, the introduction of nano BiOCl into a polyimide (PI) membrane matrix was achieved by in-situ growth and immersion precipitation phase inversion method. This resulted in high-performance PI/BiOCl photocatalytic membranes which efficiently combine the photocatalytic properties of BiOCl and the separation performance of PI membrane. Detailed investigation was conducted into the effect of BiCl 3 contents on the photocatalytic activity of the mixed matrix membrane. The membranes exhibited high flux in the separation of organic compounds and demonstrated effective performance in the photocatalytic degradation of organics. The experimental results demonstrated that the PI/BiOCl photocatalytic membranes exhibited rejection of 82.8% for ciprofloxacin (CIP) with fluxes as high as 3269.2 L·m –2 ·h –1 ·bar –1 . And photocatalytic degradations of tetracycline hydrochloride (TC) and CIP were 99.8% and 96.4%, respectively. It is also demonstrated that the membrane exhibits excellent TC degradation efficiency during five cycles within the same time frame. The mechanism of photocatalytic degradation was explored in detail. The prepared PI/BiOCl photocatalytic membrane in this work shows excellent performance and the study provides new insights for efficient separation and degradation of antibiotics in wastewater.
Feng et al. (Fri,) studied this question.