Abstract
A low-cost sulfonated polysulfone (SPSU)/poly(vinyl chloride) (PVC) substrate based high-performance thin-film composite (TFC) forward osmosis (FO) membrane was fabricated in this work. The results showed that the morphologies of the substrates were looser and more porous, and the porosity, pure water permeability, surface hydrophilicity, and average pore size of the substrates significantly improved after the SPSU was introduced into the PVC substrates. Furthermore, the SPSU/PVC-based TFC membranes exhibited rougher, looser and less crosslinked polyamide active layers than the neat PVC-based TFC membrane. The water permeability obviously increased, and the structure parameter dramatically declined. Moreover, the FO performance significantly improved (e.g. the water flux of TFC2.5 reached 25.53/48.37 LMH under FO/PRO mode by using 1.0 M NaCl/DI water as the draw/feed solution, while the specific salt flux exhibited a low value of 0.10/0.09 g/L). According to the results, it can be concluded that 2.5% of SPSU was the optimal blend ratio, which exhibited the lowest sulfonated material blend ratio compared to the data reported in the literature. Hence, this is a feasible and low-cost fabrication approach for high-performance FO membrane by using the cheap PVC and low blend-ratio SPSU as the membrane materials.
Highlights
Forward osmosis (FO) has attracted the attention of researchers as an energy-efficient membrane technology in recent years[1,2,3,4]
Compared to the external concentration polarization (ECP), which occurs outside the forward osmosis (FO) membranes, the internal concentration polarization (ICP) resides in the membranes, which means that it cannot be alleviated by hydrodynamics optimization[9]
Light transmission experiments were carried out to illustrate the effect of the blend ratios of sulfonated polysulfone (SPSU) and Poly(vinyl chloride) (PVC) on the phase inversion mechanism of the substrates
Summary
Forward osmosis (FO) has attracted the attention of researchers as an energy-efficient membrane technology in recent years[1,2,3,4]. On the other hand, sulfonated polymers, such as SPPO9, SPES12, sulfonated polysulfone (SPSU)[25], sulfonated poly(ether ketone) (SPEK)[26], disulfonated poly(arylene ether sulfone) (DSPAES)[27], and polyethersulfone and sulfonated polyphenylsulfone copolymer (PES-co-SPPSU)[28], are widely used to improve the hydrophilicity of membranes. This work aims to fabricate a high-performance TFC FO membrane with low manufacturing costs. PVC was chosen as the low-cost backbone material and SPSU as the hydrophilic modifier material for preparation of the substrates for the TFC FO membranes in this study. The SPSU/PVC substrates were first prepared for fabrication of the TFC FO membranes. The optimal blend ratio of SPSU and PVC was determined through the intrinsic properties and FO performance of the TFC membranes
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