Fabrication of flat sheet blend ultrafiltration membrane using dmac as solvent for aluminium removal

Abstract

Aluminium used in the water treatment process appears to be changed to a form that is more easily absorbed by the human body and it is important to remove the aluminium level since it can be harmful to human health. Types of solvent and material use in the development of membrane are very significant parameter as to obtain high performance membrane. Therefore, objectives of this study are to develop, determine characteristic and to evaluate the performance of aluminium removal by using DMAc as solvent in different compositions of flat sheet blend UF membranes. Thus, six variation composition of blend polymer consist cellulose acetate (CA) and polysulfone (PSf) in presence of polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) using DMAC as solvent were prepared by phase inversion method. The membranes were initially subjected to the separation of salt (NaCl), morphology using Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscopy (FESEM) and the removal of aluminium. From the results, percentage of salt rejection and flux were found increasingly as the composition of CA decrease. For morphology, the membranes observe a dense skin layer at top surface and fingers like structures at the cross sectional. On aluminium removal, membrane S6 (CA/PSf: 75/25) with rejection 87.29% and flux 10.25% was discovered as the best membrane composition due to higher rejection and increased flux compared to the other membranes. As conclusions, it found that the membrane performance showed a high rejection with increased flux if using DMAC as solvent due to increased of polymer molecules orientation in the membrane layer.