Abstract
Microfiltration polypropylene (MF-PP) membrane has been widely used in many industries due to their excellent combination of good separation performances and low production cost. In addition to membrane configuration, the structure of MF-PP membrane also plays an important role in separation performance. MF-PP membrane is commonly produced by thermal induced phase separation (TIPS) and stretching. TIPS is the simplest one where the polymer is dissolved in a solvent at a decent temperature and then cooled to induce phase separation which leads to the formation of microporous structure. However, this method is limited by the nature of PP that is difficult to dissolve in organic solvents and the solvent-contaminated effluent produced during the fabrication process. Therefore, the stretching method is more favorably used. The Stretching method involves four processing stages in sequence (i.e. melt-extrusion, annealing, stretching, and heat setting). Polymer composition, extrusion draw ratio, as well as stretching rate and temperature, are important parameters that significantly affect the pore structures evolved and thus the properties as well as the performances of MF-PP membrane. In this paper, the recent development of MF-PP fabrication by stretching methods as well as the parameters involved in each method will be reviewed and discussed comprehensively.
Highlights
Polypropylene (PP) has been utilized for polymer-basedmembrane productions due to its outstanding properties resulting in a perfect balance between cost and performances
The separation performances of a polymer membrane are determined by its intrinsic properties such as polymer crystallinity, hydrophobicity/hydrophilicity, generated charge, surface roughness, as well as porous structure across the membrane [13,14,15,16]
The Microfiltration polypropylene (MF-PP) membranes are commonly fabricated by thermal induced phase separation (TIPS)
Summary
Polypropylene (PP) has been utilized for polymer-basedmembrane productions due to its outstanding properties resulting in a perfect balance between cost and performances. The separation performances of a polymer membrane are determined by its intrinsic properties such as polymer crystallinity, hydrophobicity/hydrophilicity, generated charge, surface roughness, as well as porous structure across the membrane [13,14,15,16]. According to their average pore diameter, membranes can be classified into four classes: (1) conventional filtration (10–100 μm), microfiltration (0.1–10 μm), ultrafiltration (1–100 nm) and reverse osmosis (~0.1 nm) [17, 18]. Despite a simple and controllable procedure, the preparation of PP membranes using TIPS method is limited by the difficulty of dissolving PP; due to its high crystallinity, PP does not dissolve in most of the commercial organic solvents. This article is intended to review the recent progress of MF-PP membrane fabrication by stretching method as well as insights on how to “tailor” the pores’ structure of the membranes to increase their performances
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