Biomimetic membranes: A critical review of recent progress

Abstract

A membrane material that can concurrently provide commercially acceptable levels of water permeability, high salt rejection, and of sufficient stability to withstand mechanical and chemical stresses seems to be necessary to guarantee the energy and environmental sustainability of desalination systems and other membrane separation processes. Recent developments in desalination have shown that bio-inspired membranes are moving steadily in this direction. Sustainable desalination via aquaporin-based bio-inspired membranes is elucidated in this paper in terms of recent commercialization exploitation and progress towards real operations. Current large-scale applications, viable opportunities, remaining challenges and sustainability of operations, in terms of comparison with established technologies, are discussed in this paper. The major drawback of aquaporin-based membranes, which has been highlighted repeatedly in recent studies, is the stability of the membranes during real operations. This review is focused on recent solutions provided by scientists towards the mitigation of these problems and commercialization of aquaporin-based membranes.

Role of Nanomaterials in the Treatment of Wastewater: A Review

“…Furthermore, the removal percent of dyes or others organic pollutants is almost 99% [155]. Another important nanosorbent is zeolites, which have an absorbent structure in which several nanoparticles like copper, silver ions can be implantable [156]. The advantage of zeolites is to control the amount of metals and it also served as anti-microbial agent [157].…”

The Future of Water: A Collection of Essays on “Disruptive” Technologies that may Transform the Water Sector in the Next 10 Years

“…In these membranes water molecules are transferred through the membranes through a series of lowenergy enzymatic reactions instead of by osmotic pressure. The permeability (e.g., the volume of fresh water produced by unit surface area) of such membranes could theoretically be 5 to 1000 times higher than that of currently available RO membranes (Giwa et al, 2017).…”

Permeation of greywater constituents in an aquaporin based biomimetic forward osmosis membrane process: experimental performance and modeling

“…where B p is the pollutant permeability coefficient (L (m 2 h) −1 ); ΔC is the pollutant concentration gradient across the active layer of the membrane (g L -1 ); C F,p and C D,p are the pollutant concentrations in the FS and DS (g L -1 ), respectively. The pollutant concentration in DS (C D,p ) can be expressed by J p and J w as Eqn (6).…”

“…FO uses the osmotic pressure gradient as the driving force for the transport of water across the semi‐permeable membrane from a relatively low concentration feed solution (FS) to a concentrated draw solution (DS) and consequently resulting in concentration of the FS and dilution of the DS . A good FO membrane should have excellent water flux, high salt rejection and superb membrane stability simultaneously …”

“…4,5 A good FO membrane should have excellent water flux, high salt rejection and superb membrane stability simultaneously. 6 Aquaporins are ubiquitous biological membrane proteins acting as selective water channels through the membrane. They are capable of transporting up to one billion water molecules per second and they have excellent exclusion of solutes.…”