Abstract. As compared to membranes produced from pure polymer or pure inorganic materials, a hybrid membrane possesses better mechanical and thermal properties. This paper reported on the effect of incorporating silica nano-precursor (tetraethylorthosilicate) as well as glycerol in the formulation of hybrid membrane on the mechanical properties and antifouling properties of the resultant thin film composite membranes. The mechanical properties were measured in terms of tensile strength, tensile strain and elastic modulus. Whereas for antifouling properties, it was evaluated through the measurements of relative flux decay (RFD) and relative flux recovery (RFR), along with the permeate flux rate, percentage glycerol permeated and NaCl rejection. Results showed that the presence of silica and glycerol in hybrid membrane's formulation had increased the tensile strength and elongation of the resultant membranes. In addition to that, the incorporation of glycerol has resulted in thin film composite with better antifouling properties as compared to the thin film composite with barrier layer from the pure polymer blend. Based on its performance, the fabricated thin film composite has a great potential to be used as a pathway for crude glycerol purification due to some advantages over the existing process that employ membrane.
In this study, a thin film composite membrane was fabricated by using hybrid membrane as the barrier layer and polysulfone membrane as base membrane. During the formulation of hybrid membrane, a polymer blend of polyvinyl alcohol with chitosan was chosen as organic polymer and it was cross-linked with tetraethylorthosilicate (TEOS), where sol gel method is used to prepare the hybrid membrane. Phase inversion method is used to prepare the base membrane. The aim of this study is to determine the optimum concentration of the polymer for porous support membrane as well as the concentration of chitosan and TEOS in the fabrication of the thin film composite. Four concentrations of polysulfone (PSF) solution was prepared (13wt%, 14wt%, 15wt% and 17wt %) and the optimum concentration was determined. For the hybrid membrane, concentration of chitosan solution was varied at1wt%, 2wt% and 3wt% with fixed concentration of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) solution (10wt %). Results showed that 2wt% chitosan and 13 wt% PSF is sufficient to remove acceptable percentage of copper ion. For this purpose of identifying optimum amount of TEOS, pH of the feed copper ion solution was adjusted to three conditions (pH 3, 7, 10). Although, the percentage removal is highest at pH 10 but when dealing with natural integrated complexation method, pH 7 is found to be the optimum pH for the removal of copper ion. Besides that, 3 wt% TEOS in hybrid membrane has found to give a remarkable percentage removal of copper ion. Overall, a new formulation of thin film composite membrane show a great potential to compete with those commercial membrane in thin film composite membrane application especially separation process.
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