Recently, forward osmosis (FO) has attracted a great deal of attention in desalination and wastewater treatment. Nevertheless, there are several critical challenges such as the need for new advances in designing membranes that must be met to enhance the water flux in FO processes, control the reverse salt flux, concentration polarization and fouling. Therefore, designing a suitable membrane with a high-water flux, low reverse salt flux, low fouling, and controlled concentration polarization seems to be essential. Thin film composite (TFC) membranes are the most widely used membranes in the FO field. Extensive research has been performed to fabricate and design high performance TFC membranes which can be exclusively used in FO processes. This paper aims to review three types of TFC membranes i.e. TFC's with polyamide active layer (TFC-A), thin film nanocomposites (TFC-N) and double-skinned TFC membranes (TFC-D) in flat sheet and hollow fiber configuration. Finally, an attempt is made to generate a general performance curve based on the water flux and reverse salt flux of these three TFC FO types and the future direction of the R and D on the FO membrane are discussed.
In the present study, thin film composite (TFC) forward osmosis (FO) membranes with polycarbonate (PC (and polyether sulfone (PES) as substrates were fabricated to investigate the impact of the structural parameters of substrate on the performance of the membranes. Firstly, the substrates were prepared by Loeb‐Sourirajan method. Characterization techniques including FESEM, contact angle measurement, pure water flux, gas permeability test, and tensile test were applied to investigate the properties of the substrates. After preparing suitable substrates, active layers were fabricated via interfacial polymerization (IP) technique. The performance and characterization test showed that PC is a relatively hydrophilic polymer with a good property for using as a substrate of FO TFC membrane but as the result of gas permeability test show, this membrane has large surface pore size in comparison with PES membrane. Mean pore size of PC and PES membrane is 378 and 139 nm, respectively. Also, the results show that the effective surface porosity of PC (285, 1/m) is more than PES (213, 1/m) substrate.
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