Manufacturing, Characterisation and Mechanical Analysis of Polyacrylonitrile Membranes.

Mertol Tüfekci,Türkan Ormancı Acar,İnci Pir,Güler Türkoğlu Demirkol,Neşe Tüfekci,Sevgi Güneş Durak

doi:10.3390/polym12102378

Mertol Tüfekci, Türkan Ormancı Acar + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/polym12102378

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Abstract

To investigate the effect of polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) addition and consequently porosity, two different sets of membranes are manufactured, since PVP is a widely used poring agent which has an impact on the mechanical properties of the membrane material. The first set (PAN 1) includes polyacrylonitrile (PAN) and the necessary solvent while the second set (PAN 2) is made of PAN and PVP. These membranes are put through several characterisation processes including tensile testing. The obtained data are used to model the static behaviour of the membranes with different geometries but similar loading and boundary conditions that represent their operating conditions. This modelling process is undertaken by using the finite element method. The main idea is to investigate how geometry affects the load-carrying capacity of the membranes. Alongside membrane modelling, their materials are modelled with representative elements with hexagonal and rectangular pore arrays (RE) to understand the impact of porosity on the mechanical properties. Exploring the results, the best geometry is found as the elliptic membrane with the aspect ratio 4 and the better RE as the hexagonal array which can predict the elastic properties with an approximate error of 12%.

Highlights

Water is an essential resource for every life form’s survival
Some studies aim to improve the mechanical properties alongside the strength of membranes by adding additives and/or applying various chemical processes to their manufacturing recipe [66]. Apart from these techniques, this study introduces a new perspective and deals with the membrane structure and geometry to make the most of the existing membrane strength without adding any complications to the preparation processes
A key point of this study is to include the large deformation, which is a type of geometric nonlinearity [71,72]. These analyses aim to find better geometry to design a membrane under the same loading and boundary conditions which are representative of the actual operating conditions of wastewater treatment membranes

Summary

Introduction

Water is an essential resource for every life form’s survival. It cannot be replaced by something else and the water resources of nature are not infinite. Filtration of water by using membranes is one of the most recently developed water treatment techniques [1,2,3]. Filtration with a membrane is an efficient technique to treat water; on the other hand, it is quite expensive. This is one of the most important facts, where the idea of this study originates

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