Abstract

Polyvinylidene Fluoride (PVDF) has been used as a membrane’s base material for wastewater treatment for quite some time. Due to PVDF hydrophobic nature, fouling will occur, thus, reducing the membrane performance. The main objective of this study was to investigate the effect of various chitosan loadings on membrane hydrophilicity and overall liquid separation performance. The loadings of chitosan (wt.%) used were neat PVDF, 0.25%, 0.5%, 0.75% and 1% in PVDF mixed matrix membrane. It was found that 0.75% chitosan membrane had the lowest contact angle of 63° making it the most hydrophilic. The pure water flux test on the membranes also showed the same trend where the lowest contact angle resulting in the highest pure water flux. The PVDF membrane containing 0.75% chitosan possessed the highest pure water flux of 43.5 Lm−2h−1. With the rejection of dye of over 43.12%. The study proved that adding chitosan into PVDF membrane certainly improved the membrane hydrophilicity and the percentage removal of methylene blue dye.

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