Morphology and performance evaluation of polyethersulfonezinc oxide (PESzno) mixed matrix membrane fabricated using non solvent additive
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Date
2018-06
Authors
Jayasree Sugumaran
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Abstract
The effect of nanoparticles (NPs) in the non solvent additive modified
membrane is studied in this paper. The ratio of acetone/NMP is manipulated and its
effect to morphology and performance of membrane is observed and the best
performing ratio of acetone/NMP is used to fabricate a mixed matrix membrane with
ZnO-NPs. Addition of acetone results in thick skin layer followed by reduced finger
like macrovoids which improved the rejection but decreased pure water flux. Acetone
incorporation into membrane reduces hydrophilicity while, the surface roughness
decrease slightly. The tight skin layer with reduced porosity and pore size of acetone
modified membrane can minimize the fouling effect. The FRR value of acetone/NMP
ratio of 0.05 is as high as 97.93 % but the value decreased by 24.92% when the ratio of
solvent is 0.20. High concentration of acetone reduce the hydrophilicity cause several
fouling. The incorporation ZnO-NPs into the NSA modified membrane can improve
the hydrophilicity and porosity, hence the pure water flux improves. But, the
irreversible fouling of membrane with 0.5 wt.% of ZnO increase significantly
compared to the membrane with acetone alone which is again due the open pore in
ZnO modified membrane. But, the Flux Reduction Ratio (FRR) values improves with
the increase of ZnO, as the membrane become hydrophilic reduce the humic acid
adsorption.The pore blocking behaviour PES/NMP/Acetone and PES/NMP/Acetone/ZnO
are evaluated based on 4 pore blocking models. The cake filtration is the dominant pore
blocking cause for both membrane at initial (20 min) and final stage (21 min to 60 min). But,
the coefficient of determination, R2 value for other pore blocking models is nearly same as
the cake filtration so, fouling may be due the combination of all the models.