Bacterial cellulose membranes for ultrafiltration

Palai, Debabrata and Khandelwal, Mudrika (2019) Bacterial cellulose membranes for ultrafiltration. Masters thesis, Indian institute of technology Hyderabad.

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Abstract

The interest in the use of bio-based filters has increased in recent years, as such filters have the potential to be affordable, lightweight and biodegradable. Bacterial cellulose (BC) is one of the important bio-based filters with 3D-Interwoven network. The main objective of this work is to make a depth filter membrane using bacterial cellulose for ultrafiltration (UF) and tune its filtration efficiency. Initially, this research proceeds with the synthesis of pure bacterial cellulose at different time of incubation. Later on, the porosity of the cellulose was modified by polyethylene glycol of different molecular weights (2 kDa and 20 kDa). The microstructure and porosity of cellulose materials were studied by Scanning electron microscopy and BET-Isotherm techniques, respectively. Infra-red spectroscopy of PEG-modified cellulose confirms that PEG was completely removed during washing of pellicles with water. Pure cellulose and modified cellulose are freeze dried and used as UF membrane. Pure cellulose based UF membrane showed the bacterial rejection of 36% while using spent cellulose culture media as test filtering fluid. PEG-modified cellulose filter, cellulose filter and multilayered depth filter showed significant reduction in silver nanoparticle of 10 and 30 nm size on passing a dilute aqueous solution of these nanoparticles through them, which was confirmed by UV-Vis spectrophotometry. This indicates that cellulose and modified cellulose can be used as ultrafiltration membranes.

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