Mitigation of Membrane Fouling Using an Electroactive Polyether Sulfone Membrane

Abstract

Membrane fouling is the bottleneck limiting the wide application of membrane processes. Herein, we adopted an electroactive polyether sulfone (PES) membrane capable of mitigating fouling by various negatively charged foulants. To evaluate anti-fouling performance and the underlying mechanism of this electroactive PES membrane, three types of model foulants were selected rationally (e.g., bovine serum albumin (BSA) and sodium alginate (SA) as non-migratory foulants, yeast as a proliferative foulant and emulsified oil as a spreadable foulant). Water flux and total organic carbon (TOC) removal efficiency in the filtering process of various foulants were tested under an electric field. Results suggest that under electrochemical assistance, the electroactive PES membrane has an enhanced anti-fouling efficacy. Furthermore, a low electrical field was also effective in mitigating the membrane fouling caused by a mixture of various foulants (containing BSA, SA, yeast and emulsified oil). This result can be attributed to the presence of electrostatic repulsion, which keeps foulants away from the membrane surface. Thereby it hinders the formation of a cake layer and mitigates membrane pore blocking. This work implies that an electrochemical control might provide a promising way to mitigate membrane fouling.

Fabrication of a Novel (PVDF/MWCNT/Polypyrrole) Antifouling High Flux Ultrafiltration Membrane for Crude Oil Wastewater Treatment

“…Moreover, the surface charge of the membrane is a vital factor in oil adsorption on the surface of the membrane due to the electrostatic interaction between the charged membrane surface and oil wastewater. As crude oil wastewater is negatively charged molecules (the measured zeta potential is -15 mV), an electrostatic interaction occurs between oil and the positively charged membrane surface, as shown previously in Figure 5 (+15.8 mV), causing oil molecules adsorption leading to high oil removal rate by the modified membranes [71].…”

Membrane Fouling in Algal Separation Processes: A Review of Influencing Factors and Mechanisms

“…Membrane materials used in algal biotechnologies can be classified into organic and inorganic (Zhang Y. et al, 2019). Polymeric organic materials used in membranes include polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) (Marbelia et al, 2018), polyacrylonitrile (PAN) (Marbelia et al, 2016), polyethersulfone (PES) (Yogarathinam et al, 2018), cellulose acetate (CA), polyethylene terephthalate (PET) (Kim et al, 2020;Kusumocahyo et al, 2020;Wu and Sancaktar, 2020), polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), regenerated cellulose (RC), polysulfone (PS) (Ma et al, 2020;Zhao et al, 2021a,b), polyamide (PA), and cellulose ester (CE) (Zhang M. et al, 2019). Inorganic materials, such as ZrO 2 -TiO 2 , are commonly used in ceramic membranes (Low et al, 2016;Hua et al, 2020).…”

“…Membrane modifications have been recently applied by coating the surface with polymers and inorganic nanoparticles, aiming to control the overall electrostatic repulsion/attraction and hydrophobic/hydrophilic interactions in the membrane-foulant interface (Liu et al, 2019;Soleimani et al, 2021;Zhao et al, 2021a;Zheng et al, 2021). Hence, recent efforts in surface coating with hydrophilic monomers, surface grafting with hydrophilic polymer bushes, and nanomaterial incorporation have been developed to improve the filtration performance (Hu et al, 2015;Liao et al, 2018;Liu et al, 2019;Ma et al, 2020;Mat Nawi et al, 2020). In addition, the incorporation of TiO 2 , Fe 2 O 3 , zeolites, silica, and silver has been found to increase the hydrophilicity of the membrane, thereby enhancing the permeate flux (Hu et al, 2015).…”

Experimental and Computational Fluid Dynamics Investigation of the Deterioration of the Rejection Capacity of the Membranes Used in the Filtration of Oily Water Systems

“…Fouling provokes a decline in permeate flux and seriously impacts its filtration capacity. Consequently, studies of the mitigation of fouling have become more frequent with the development of membrane technology in various applications. − The extent of fouling is mainly related to the composition and stability of the feed, the membrane material affinity properties, and the process operating conditions [e.g., crossflow velocity (CFV), transmembrane pressure (TMP), temperature, pH, etc …”