Fabrication of a new type of polyvinyl alcohol/sulfosuccinic acid/glutaric anhydride cation exchange membrane for desalination using membrane capacitive deionization

Abstract

Nowadays, the lack of clean water is becoming a serious problem, due to the increasingdemand for clean water, along with global climate change. Desalination of sea water orbrackish water has been considered as a practicable method to supply clean water. Amongdesalination technologies, membrane capacitive deionization has emerged for the last 15years as an alternative method and received a lot of research attention since then. In thisstudy, low-cost and ecofriendly polyvinyl alcohol/sulfosuccinic acid/glutaric anhydridecomposite membranes were fabricated through the crosslinking reaction of sulfosuccinicacid and glutaric anhydride with polyvinyl alcohol. The effect of sulfosuccinic acid andglutaric anhydride content was investigated. The presence of SSA in the cation exchangemembrane, which was proven by FT-IR, helps improve its water uptake (98.5 % comparedto 38.2 %) as well as cation exchange capacity (1.993 mM/g compared to 0.156 mM/g).The polyvinyl alcohol/sulfosuccinic acid/glutaric anhydride composite solution wascoated on the electrode, and the membrane's ability to desalinate water was assessed. Themembrane-coated electrode exhibited enhanced salt adsorption capacity and shorterdesalination time (13.4 minutes compared to 85.3 minutes) in comparison with theuncoated commercial electrode, indicating that the polyvinyl alcohol/sulfosuccinicacid/glutaric anhydride membrane is a suitable candidate to be utilized in the membranecapacitive deionization systems.® 2022 Journal of Science and Technology - NTTU