Wood veneer with high flexible decorated with nanoparticles for highly efficient water treatment

IRG/WP 19-50347

S Chang, D Xu, G Liu, J Hu, X Li, Y Liu

Natural wood is mainly comprised of numerous long, partially aligned channels (lumens) as well as nanochannels. Wood with these quick and effective passages is suitable for a membrane/separation material. However, a suitable thickness range of wood along its growth direction is essential to effectively separate small molecular, and the wood membrane is too thick to clean easily. In this paper, wood veneer (the thickness is 0.4 mm) with high flexible, decorated with Pd nanoparticles was used for highly efficient water treatment. First, mussel-inspired polydopamine (PDA) was used to modify wood pores with highly active functional groups. Then Pd nanoparticles could be in-situ grown and immobilized onto wood channels via these highly active functional groups. As filtering direction is perpendicular to wood growth direction, the membrane possesses abundant sinuous water channels, and it provides a long enough water transfer and micro reaction pathways. As a proof of concept, we demonstrated that Pd loaded wood veneer membrane has a highly efficient water treatment in removing methylene blue (MB) aqueous solution. The water flux of Pd loaded wood veneer membrane can reach 3462 L·m-2·h-1 with a high MB removal efficiency (>95%). The wood veneer membrane with sinuous water channels exhibits promising results for wastewater treatment and is applicable for an even wider range of separation applications.


Keywords: wood veneer, membrane, polydopamine, Pd, sinuous channels, water treatment

Conference: 19-05-12/16 Quebec City, Canada


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