High mechanical strength thin film composite membranes

• Main Author: Low, Ruey Ming.
• Other Authors: Sun Delai, Darren
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/52753
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Increasing water demand has become an alarming global issue. The important of producing clean portable water with lesser energy consumption have gained a lot of attention globally. Lots of effort and research have been put into water treatment technologies and new technologies have emerged over the years. Reverse Osmosis (RO) is one of the most conventional and successful water technologies invented. However, it still consumes a considerable amount of energy in order to produce clean portable water. Recent year, it is discovered that with the use of Forward Osmosis (FO) and Pressure Retarded Osmosis (PRO) could greatly reduce the amount of energy consumption in the water treatment process. However, there is not much actual use of these two technologies due to three main challenges they faces. The three challenges are there is not yet a tailor custom made membrane for these two technologies, a suitable draw solution and lastly, fouling problems. This study would focus on one of the challenges which is to fabricate a membrane custom for FO and PRO. Most of the conventional water treatment membranes are meant for RO. Thin film composite (TFC) membrane is one of the good FO membranes which demonstrated with high performance. One of the limitations of the membranes it has is that the membranes do not possess high mechanical strength therefore it cannot uses for high pressure system. This study would focus in increasing the mechanical strength of the supportive layer of the TFC membrane. Silica which is believed that will increase the mechanical properties is added into TFC membrane in this study. Different types of silica are used and tested. The TFC membranes incorporated with silica do show an increase of mechanical strength which will be useful in the near future.