Synthesis of low cost ultrafiltration membrane

Abstract

This study is regarding synthesizing low cost ultrafiltration (UF) membrane that can perform well in removing dye. To simplify this study, dye has been chosen to study the performance rather than microorganism because of the fact that membrane that able to remove smaller particle such as Methylene Blue (7 x 16Å) indirectly was also able to eliminate pathogenic microorganism (20nm)The problem statement that leads to this study is the cost of commercial UF membrane which is capable to remove microorganism in drinking water is very high causes people could not effort to purchase it. In this study,UF membranes were developed using waste recyclable plastics; polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and Polystyrene (PS). Polymer solution concentration from20% to 24% for PVC and 19% to 22% for PS was formulated. N-methyl-2- pyrrolidone (NMP)was used as solvent for both materials to prepare casting solution. The membranes were developed using Diffusion phase inversion method.Therejections, flux, pure water permeability, fouling analysis were carried out and further analysed the membrane characteristics with the aid of technologies such as Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR), Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) and Atomic Force Microscope (AFM). Another membrane with mixture of 19% PS and 3% PVC were developed and tested the effect of mixture in additional. The rejection percentage varies when type of polymer is different. Based on the analysis, polystyrene had shown better performance compared to PVC material. In this study, 19% PS + 3% PVC membrane had showed the best performance in term of rejection %, flux and fouling.