Development of advanced nanocomposite membranes using graphene nanoribbons and nanosheets for water treatment

Abstract

Water-intensive industries have to comply with stringent environmental regulations and evolving regulatory frameworks requiring the development of new technologies for water recycling.Development of polymeric membranes may provide an effective solution to improve water recycling, but require finely-tuned pore size and surface chemistry for ionic and molecular sieving to be efficient. Additionally, fouling is a major challenge that limits the practical application of the membranes in water recycling in these industries. In this work, four different graphene oxide (GO) derivatives were incorporated into a polyethersulfone (PES) matrix via a non-solvent induced phase separation (NIPS) method. The GO derivatives used have different shapes (nanosheets vs nanoribbons) and different oxidation states (C/O=1.05-8.01) with the potential to enhance water flux and suppress fouling of the membranes through controlled pore size, hydrophilicity, and surface charge. The permeation properties of the PES/GO membranes were evaluated using a water sample from the Athabasca oil sands of Alberta. The results for contact angle and streaming potential measurements indicate the formation of more hydrophilic and negatively charged PES/GO nanocomposite membranes. All graphene-based nanocomposite membranes demonstrated better water flux and rejection of organic matter compared to the unmodified PES membrane. The fouling measurement results revealed that fouling was impeded due to enhanced membrane surface properties. Longitudinally unzipped graphene oxide nanoribbons (GONR-L) at an optimum loading of 0.1 weight percent (wt.%) provided the maximum water flux (70 LMH at 60 psi), organic matter rejection (59%) and antifouling properties (30% improvement compared to pristine PES membrane). Flux recovery ratio experiments indicated a remarkable enhancement in the fouling resistance property of PES/GO nanocomposite membranes.

The Influence of Graphene Addition on the Properties of Composite rGO/PAN Membranes and Their Potential Application for Water Disinfection

“…One of the reasons for bacteria destruction may be breaking of the thin cell membrane, resulting in a leakage of cytoplasm, described in the literature [14,15]. In another case, bacteria death occurs as a result of wrapping and/or trapping the bacteria, resulting in membrane stress and/or oxidative stress, as well as loss of cell viability and DNA fragmentation [15,34]. Therefore, we conducted tests with the use of thermally reduced graphene oxide with two different nanoparticle sizes.…”

Durability and Recoverability of Soft Lithographically Patterned Hydrogel Molds for the Formation of Phase Separation Membranes

“…As permeation characteristics of membranes improved, the rejection capability is reduced [10]. To improve membrane performance and lower the membrane fouling, chemical treatments [11,12] or physical modifications [13,14] have commonly been attempted by either coating the membrane surface with hydrophilic/hydrophobic layers or modifying the membrane matrix by blending with additives (such as nanofillers, surfactants, and polymeric additives). However, these approaches suffer from many disadvantages which restrict their extended applications in practice.…”

Understanding the morphology of MWCNT/PES mixed-matrix membranes using SANS: interpretation and rejection performance

“…Thus, the idea of membranes having both polymeric substrate as well as inorganic filler came in existence, which can overcome the above-mentioned limitations to a large extent. There are different studies having various fillers like Fe 3 O 4 nanoparticles (Alam et al 2013;Chan et al 2015;Ghaemi et al 2015;Bagheripour et al 2016;Mondal et al 2017), oxidized multiwalled nanotubes (Yin et al 2013;Celik et al 2011a, b), TiO 2 nanoparticles (Luo et al 2005;Rahimpour et al 2012;Esfahani et al 2015;Mbuli et al 2018;Farahani and Vatanpour 2018), functionalized MWCNT (Qiu et al 2009;Liu et al 2018;Benally et al 2018;Ho et al 2017;Lee et al 2016), silver nanoparticles (Taurozzi et al 2008;Zhang et al 2012;Sonawane et al 2017), modified silica nanoparticle (Farahani and Vatanpour 2018;Huang et al 2017;Martín et al 2016), chitosan/zinc oxide nanoparticles (Munnawar et al 2017;Ahmad et al 2017;Elizalde et al 2018), beta cyclodextrin-polyurethane (Adams et al 2014), graphene oxide (Ho et al 2017;Chai et al 2017;Karim et al 2017;Mukherjee et al 2016;Karkooti et al 2018), manganese oxide and alumina nanoparticles (Delavara et al 2017;Gohari et al 2014), zeolites (Liu et al 2014;Grabczyk et al 2017;Amiri et al 2017), attapulgite…”