Fabrication of high performance nanofiltration membrane by construction of Noria based nanoparticles interlayer

• 1. A Noria-BDSA nanoparticles interlayer was constructed in the interfacial polymerization process. • 2. The obtained TFC based NF membrane had a thin and crumpled PA layer with a high degree of crosslinking. • 3. The prepared TFC membrane had a high permeability and selectivity. Improving the permeability and selectivity of the thin-film composite (TFC) nanofiltration membranes is the key to energy conservation and emission reduction in water treatment. Nowadays, the construction of interlayer is an effective approach to improve the performance of TFC nanofiltration membranes, and the construction of interlayer is a much more effective approach, which can directly form an interlayer in the interfacial polymerization (IP) process. However, there are few studies on the construction of nanoparticles based interlayer, due to the stability problem of nanomaterial dispersion system. Herein, Noria and 2, 2′-benzidinedisulfonic acid (BDSA) were used to prepare a novel kind of stable nanoparticles system, which can be formed as Noria-BDSA nanoparticles interlayer for follow-up IP process. The TFC membrane with Noria-BDSA nanoparticles interlayer had a thin and crumpled polyamide layer, which can reduce the hydraulic resistance and improve the effective area during the separation process. Hence, the permeability of this TFC membrane (24.01 L m -2 h −1 bar −1 ) was about 3.5 times that of the conventional TFC membrane. Furthermore, the polyamide layer of this TFC membrane had a higher crosslinking degree, which made it have a higher rejection than conventional one.