ABSTRACT Nanofiltration (NF) technology is an important technique for addressing the global water crisis, but the bacterial fouling in long‐term running reduces the lifetime and limits the application of NF membranes. To solve this problem, a kind of sandwich‐shaped thin‐film composite (TFC) polyamide (PA) membranes with silver combined polymeric nanoparticles (PNs/Ag) as interlayer was fabricated in this work. Analysis via energy‐dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) and field‐emission scanning electron microscopy (FE‐SEM) confirmed the successful formation of a silver layer through in situ reduction, which was observed to uniformly encapsulate the polymeric nanoparticle surfaces. The prepared NF membranes had a pure water flux of 71.0 L m −2 h −1 and Na 2 SO 4 rejection of 96.7% at 5.0 bar. The application prospect of NF membranes was proved by a series of testing under different operation conditions. The successful introduction of PNs/Ag enhanced the antibacterial performance of the NF membrane against E. coli and S. aureus in static bacteria adhesion test. This work proposes a feasible strategy for the construction of NF membranes with antibacterial property.
Huang et al. (Sat,) studied this question.