Fabrication and characterization of extracted microsized chitosan embedded PVDF membrane for wastewater treatment

Abstract Critical water crisis due to overpopulation, industrialization and urbanization has resulted to the shortfall of providing safe drinking water to one billion people in the world. This work intends to fabricate modified hydrophobic polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) membrane by hydrophilic chitosan extracted from waste fish scales for wastewater treatment. Chitosan was blended with PVDF in N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone solution by solution casting method. Three different concentrations of 1, 3 and 5 wt% of chitosan were taken. The morphological, spectral and thermal analysis of the produced films were elaborately studied. The contact angle decreased with the increase of chitosan content from 82.64° to 60.97°. The tensile strength decreases from 1.11 to 0.38 MPa and Young’s modulus decreased from 12.08 to 7.4 MPa with increase in chitosan content in the film from 1 to 3 %. The performance of microparticle embedded membrane was compared with the pristine PVDF membrane, and it was affirmed that the microsized-chitosan embedded PVDF membrane manifests a broad promising application perspective towards wastewater treatment owing to its excellent water flux (76 L m −2 h −1 ) as well as antibacterial properties.