Effect of chitosan modification on PAN/nanosilica adsorptive membrane for quercetin filtration

Quercetin is a plant pigment from flavonoid group found in many plants and foods such as onions, green tea, apples and berries and can be taken as health supplements to support heart issues and prevent cancer due to the function of antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects. Basically, quercetin can be easily separated from water sources when it is operated with nanofiltration (NF) and reverse osmosis (RO) mode since the pore size of membrane is very small. However, these processes generally require high operating pressure during treatment process, resulting in significant energy consumption. Thus, an adsorptive membrane is fabricated with microfiltration (MF) range combining polyacrylonitrile (PAN) and nanosilica as the adsorbent to adsorb quercetin on the membrane with lower pressure in the operation. This paper is focused on modification of PAN/Nanosilica adsorptive membrane with chitosan to improve the performance flux and quercetin adsorption varying two membrane modification methods which are chitosan coating and chitosan blending. The adsorptive membrane fabricated using PAN/Nanosilica modified by chitosan coating is found as the best membrane for quercetin filtration compared to PAN/Nanosilica membrane modified by chitosan blending because higher initial flux for pure water and quercetin were achieved and flux reduction for quercetin using PAN/Nanosilica/Chitosan coated membrane is the lowest which is 57.5%.