Nano architectured cues as sustainable membranes for ultrafiltration in blood hemodialysis

Highlights: • Pristine PSU, PEG/CA, and PEG with mordenite zeolite membranes were fabricated by phase inversion technique. • From all the samples PEG/CA-1 provides high flux 45.5± 2 L/m² h at 25^◦C and 2 bar pressure. • PEG membranes gave 93% BSA rejection and 89% urea clearance. • Maximum creatinine adsorption that is 9643 μg/g obtained by PEG/CA membrane. • The PEG/CA membrane showed attractive biocompatibility results as compared to pristine PSU and PEG membranes. Membranes with zeolites are encouraging for performing blood dialysis because zeolites can eliminate uremic toxins through molecular sieving. Although the addition of various pore-gen and adsorbent in the membrane can certainly impact the membrane production along with creatinine adsorption, however, it is not directed which pore-gen along with zeolite leads to better performance. The research was aimed at reducing the adsorption of protein-bound and uremic toxins by using mordenite zeolite as an adsorbent while polyethylene glycol and cellulose acetate as a pore generating agent. Membranes were cast by a phase-inversion technique which is cheap and easy to handle as compared to the electro-spinning technique. Through this strategy, the ability to adsorb creatinine and solute rejection percentage were measured and compared against the pristine PSU, when only PEG was used as a pore-modifier and when PEG along with CA was used as a pore-modifier along with a different concentration of zeolite. The experiments revealed that PEG membranes can give a better solute rejection percentage (93%) but with a low creatinine adsorption capacity that is 7654 μg/g and low bio-compatibility (PRT 392 s, HR 0.46%). However, PEG/CA membranes give maximum creatinine adsorption that is 9643 μg/g and also better bio-compatibility (PRT 490 s, HR 0.37%) but with a low BSA rejection (72%) as compared to the pristine PSU and PEG membranes. The present study finds that the concentration of mordenite zeolite affects the membrane performance because its entrapment and large pore size of the membrane decreases solute rejection but increases creatinine uptake level along with the better bio-compatibility.