Oxygen-accelerated polymerization and homogeneous surface modification process using aqueous dopamine solution

Abstract

Efficient, facile surface modifications on any materials have attracted great interest in many important technological applications such as biomedical fields, and membrane separations. Recently the surface modification of any materials using aqueous dopamine solutions including dopamine has attracted a great interest owing to their facile, universal approaches. In particular surface modification with dopamine, in the form of polydopamine or supramolecules, has been applied for fouling-resistant membrane materials for water purification and desalination.In this work, we are interested in the process parameters for achieving homogeneous, and hydrophilic treatment on membrane surfaces using dopamine coating technologies. In particular, we tried to study on the oxygen effect of polydopamine reaction on the membrane surface coating. And we demonstrate that the surface morphology of coating layer and the consumption rate of dopamine in dopamine solution can be tuned by the amount of dissolved oxygen in the starting solution.