Three-dimensional porous imprinted UiO-66-D@loofah membrane for targeted separation of Artemisinin by smart situ deposition method

Artemisinin (Art) is the primary therapies for plasmodium falciparum malaria. However, it is very cumbersome to extract artemisinin from the plant Artemisia annua L. Herein, a novel defect-type UiO-66 structure was proposed, which can adsorb artemisinin through effective sites provided by ‘template molecules’. At the same time, the delayed phase inversion technology was used to prepare the loofah membrane to make the defect-type UiO-66 uniformly dispersed in the pores. In addition, the inside of the biomass loofah membrane had good mechanical properties and loofah membrane wrapped with polyacrylonitrile (PAN) can make Art solution evenly dispersed in each channel, greatly improving the utilization rate of defect-type UiO-66. The defect-type UiO-66 and the UiO-66-D@loofah membrane were characterized using various methods, including SEM, EDS, FT-IR, XRD, contact angle, and mechanical performance analyses. Compared with the static adsorption behavior of powder and loofah membrane, it was found that the adsorption performance presented an optimal adsorption capacity (56.548 mg g−1) at the flow rate of 5 mL min−1, which was better than that of powder (27.096 mg g−1) as well as the static loofah membrane (33.127 mg g−1). The structural design of the membrane has provided a new solution for the extraction of Art from Artemisia annua L.