Integrated Membrane System Wettability – A Review

Abstract

Integrated membrane system is one of the current leading techniques repoprted for oil-water separation in current years. These combination of different filtration membranes offered the improved separation efficiency of the integrated membrane system during oil-water separation. Although the integrated membrane system is hilighted as the promissing method for oil-water separtion in various industries, the poor membrane wettability was reported which hampers the performance of the membrane. The poor estimation of the membrane wettability in the integrated membrane feed stream leads to the pores blockages, decline oil-water efficiecy and pooor oil/water rejection ratio. The integrated membrane feed stream is prone to membrane fouling during oil-water sepration due to poor membrane wattability. To improve the performance of the integrated membrane system this review covers the membrane wettability during oil-water separation, the techniques used to improve the membrane wettability during oil-water separtion and mathematical models developed to enhance the fundermental understanding of the membrane wettability during oil-water separation. Even though the integrated membrane feed stream has been reported to be having the limitation due to the poor membrane wettabillity, the integrated membrane system is still considered to be the better technique which separates the oil-water emulsions compared to the traditional methods.