Morphological Comparison of 3D Printed Feed Spacers for Spiral Wound Membrane Modules

• Main Authors: Tan, Wen See, Chua, Chee Kai, Fane, Anthony Gordon, An, Jia, Chong, Tzyy Haur
• Other Authors: School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: Membrane Feed Spacers; Additive Manufacturing
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/84400; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/41773
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This paper presents the preliminary work done on the fabrication of feed channel spacers with rapid prototyping, 3D printing or additive manufacturing (AM) techniques, involving fused deposition modeling (FDM) and polyjet printing. Feed channel spacers are mesh-like structures placed between membrane leafs in spiral wound modules (SWM) for water treatment applications. AM techniques are employed as tools to fabricate novel feed spacer with complex geometries that maximize mass transfer and minimize feed channel pressure drop and fouling across the SWM. The morphology of the AM printed spacer samples, as well as the dimensional accuracies are examined and compared in this paper.