Bisphenol A removal using visible light driven Cu2O/PVDF photocatalytic dual layer hollow fiber membrane

Abstract

Bisphenol A (BPA) is amongst the endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs) that cause illness to humans and in this work was removed using copper (I) oxide (Cu2O) visible light photo-catalyst which has a narrow bandgap of 2.2 eV. This was done by embedding Cu2O into polyvinyl-idene fluoride (PVDF) membranes to generate a Cu2O/PVDF dual layer hollow fiber (DLHF) membrane using a co‐extrusion technique. The initial ratio of 0.25 Cu2O/PVDF was used to study varia-tion of the outer dope extrusion flowrate for 3 mL/min, 6 mL/min and 9 mL/min. Subsequently, the best flowrate was used to vary Cu2O/PVDF for 0.25, 0.50 and 0.75 with fixed outer dope extrusion flowrate. Under visible light irradiation, 10 mg/L of BPA was used to assess the membranes perfor-mance. The results show that the outer and inner layers of the membrane have finger‐like structures, whereas the intermediate section of the membrane has a sponge‐like structure. With high porosity up to 63.13%, the membrane is hydrophilic and exhibited high flux up to 13,891 L/m2h. The opti-mum photocatalytic membrane configuration is 0.50 Cu2O/PVDF DLHF membrane with 6 mL/min outer dope flowrate, which was able to remove 75% of 10 ppm BPA under visible light irradiation without copper leaching into the water sample.