Yanan Dong

Efficient Wastewater Treatment by Membranes through Constructing Tunable Antifouling Membrane Surfaces

In the present study, a facile in situ approach for constructing tunable amphiphilic or hydrophilic antifouling membrane surfaces was demonstrated by exquisitely manipulating the microphase separation and surface segregation behavior of the tailor-made ternary amphiphilic block copolymers during the commonly utilized wet phase inversion membrane-formation process. Under dead-end filtration for oily wastewater treatment, the membrane with amphiphilic surface exhibited over 99.5% retention ratio of chemical oxygen demand (COD) without appreciable membrane fouling: the water permeation flux was slightly decreased during operation (total flux decline was 6.8%) and almost completely recovered to the initial value (flux recovery ratio was more than 99.0%) after simple hydraulic washing. While for the proteins-containing wastewater treatment, the membrane with hydrophilic surface exhibited about 52.6% COD retention ratio and superior antifouling performance: only 17.0% total flux decline and also more than 99.0% flux recovery ratio. Hopefully, the present approach can be developed as a competitive platform technology for the preparation of robust and versatile antifouling membrane, leading to the high process efficiency of wastewater treatments.

Ultrafiltration Enhanced with Activated Carbon Adsorption for Efficient Dye Removal from Aqueous Solution

Abstract In this study, orange G dye was efficiently removed from aqueous solution by ultrafiltration (UF) membrane separation enhanced with activated carbon adsorption. The powdered activated carbon (PAC) was deposited onto the UF membrane surface, forming an intact filter cake. The enhanced UF process simultaneously exploited the high water permeation flux of porous membrane and the high adsorption ability of PAC toward dye molecules. The influencing factors on the dye removal were investigated. The results indicated that with sufficient PAC incorporation, the formation of intact PAC filtration cake led to nearly complete rejection for dye solution under optimized dye concentration and operation pressure, without large sacrificing the permeation flux of the filtration process. Typically, the dye rejection ratio increased from 43.6% for single UF without adsorption to nearly 100% for the enhanced UF process, achieving long time continuous treatment with water permeation flux of 47 L·m −2 ·h −1 . The present study demonstrated that adsorption enhanced UF may be a feasible method for the dye wastewater treatment.