Journal
JOURNAL OF MEMBRANE SCIENCE
Volume 617, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.memsci.2020.118610
Keywords
Atomic layer deposition (ALD); Computational fluid dynamics (CFD); Hollow-fiber membranes; Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE); Selectivity-permeability trade-off
Categories
Funding
- National Key Research and Development Program of China [2018YFE0203502]
- Jiangsu Natural Science Foundation [BK20190677]
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [21908096]
- Natural Science Foundation of the Higher Education Institutions of Jiangsu Province [19KJB530007]
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The use of ALD to coat ultra-thin layers of alumina on PTFE HFMs in water treatment significantly enhances permselectivity and fouling resistance. The CFD-optimized ALD process is expected to be a universal strategy for efficiently enhancing the performance of polymeric membranes.
Polytetrafluoroethylene hollow-fiber membranes (PTFE HFMs) with attractive advantages are highly promising for many applications, but strong hydrophobicity limits their uses in aqueous systems. To address this challenge, we propose to coat ultra-thin layers of alumina by atomic layer deposition (ALD) to upgrade performances of PTFE HFMs in water treatment. However, ALD usually requires time- and labor-consuming trial-and-error to optimize operating parameters. Herein, we use computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to identify most appropriate ALD parameters for PTFE HFMs functionalization. Following the CFD-optimized parameters, the ALD-treated membranes obtain significantly improved permselectivity and fouling resistance because of the remarkable increase in wettability at negligible cost in pore sizes. Impressively, water permeability of membranes is nearly doubled while rejection is increased by similar to 20%, which is seldom achieved by other methods. This CFD-optimized ALD process is expected to be a universal strategy to efficiently enhance the performances of polymeric membranes.
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