Nanofiltration of Xylitol Mixed Solution Using Polyethersulfone Membrane in Presence of Silicon Dioxide Nanoparticles or Pluronic F127 Additives: A Comparative Study

Xylitol is a valuable product in medicine and food fields and can be produced mainly by two processes: (1) chemically with catalyst and (2) bio technologically with yeast, fungi or bacteria. This xylitol is commonly present in mixture form which consist of xylitol, xylose and arabinose. Thus purification is required to increase its value either by crystallization, adsorption or membrane technology. The aim of this work is to investigate the influence of using different nanofiltration (NF) membranes to achieve high purity of xylitol from model solution. In order to achieve a desirable purity of xylitol, in-house synthesized NF membranes from pure PES, PES/SiO2 and PES/Pluronic f127 were used in this study. These NF membranes were fabricated via phase inversion method and further characterized to investigate their performances suitable for xylitol purification. To achieve that: a contact angle was used for hydrophilicity, pure water flux (PWF), xylitol permeation and rejection were investigated for the best membrane performances. The contact angle results for these three membranes showed that the SiO2 nanoparticles (NPs) have the best effect on hydrophilicity, moreover, the PWF enhanced and the PES/ Pluronic showed the higher water flux. The highest rejection was accomplished with single PES membrane. Keywords: Xylitol, nanofiltration, PES, Pluronic, SiO2 NPs.