Module performance of anion-exchange porous hollow-fiber membranes for high-speed protein recovery

A laboratory-scale module was fabricated by housing eight anion-exchange porous hollow-fiber membranes with an effective length of 8 cm in parallel to each other in a cartridge. The hollow fibers were prepared by radiation-induced graft polymerization of glycidyl methacrylate and subsequent chemical modifications using diethylamine and ethanolamine. The resultant hollow fibers had diethylamino and ethanolamino group densities of 2.1 and 1.2 mmol/g of the dry hollow fiber, respectively, with inner and outer diameters of 2.8 and 4.4 mm, respectively, in a wet state. A low operating pressure of 0.1 MPa in the module provided a flow-rate of 100 ml/min for a bovine serum albumin solution. The dynamic binding amount of bovine serum albumin for the module was 270 mg, irrespective of the flow-rate, for rates ranging from 10 to 100 ml/min. The dynamic binding amount for the module was equivalent to eight times that of a single hollow fiber with an identical effective length, which indicates a linear relationship between the module and the number of single fibers for dynamic binding amount. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.