Preparation of activated carbon incorporated polysulfone membranes for dye separation

Abstract

Immediate use of activated carbon incorporated polysulfone membrane application for dye separation was reported in this work. Dimethylformamide (DMF) was used as the solvent for the membrane preparation. The membrane thus prepared were characterized in terms of surface morphology, ATR-FTIR, AFM, experimental results as membrane performance. The resultant nanofiltration (NF) membranes were tested with Congo red dye concentration 200 mg/L. The water permeability was found to be considerably higher than that reported in literature. Experimental results show that the real rejection of the Congo red is 99.57% over the transmembrane pressure 100 psi using 30% activated carbon incorporated membrane. Prepared NF membranes shows the corresponding permeates fluxes were 40 Lm-2h-1 to 82 Lm-2h-1 with different activated carbon percentage incorporated in polysulfone membrane. The present study demonstrated that dye rejection enhanced NF may be a feasible method for the dye wastewater treatment. The overall observations thus indicated that toxic residual dyes can be appreciably separated from the membrane technology, provided that the accompanying polymeric membrane, activated carbon as binding agents and the process parameter levels are astutely selected.