Recent Developments on Membranes for Water Treatment and Industrial Separation

Clean water crisis and fresh water shortage are becoming the most critical global challenges with the increasing population growth, speeding urbanization and worsening climate change. Membrane–based technology has been developed as the most efficient and cost-effective water treatment approach for desalination, wastewater reclamation and water purification. Meanwhile, membrane plays an important role in the fields of environmental engineering and industrial separation.

In this talk, we would like to share our recent developments on membranes for water treatment and industrial separation at State Key Laboratory, Tianjin Polytechnic University. Several innovative surface engineering approaches such as grafting nanomaterials and 3D hyperbranched polymers etc., have been proposed to prepare novel antifouling and antibacterial forward osmosis and reverse osmosis membranes. Meanwhile, hydrophobic microporous membrane materials such as polyphenylene sulfide have been fabricated for membrane distillation. We synthesized a polysulfone based block copolymer with PEG functional blocks and fabricated a series of hydrophilic ultrafiltration membranes for different applications, especially for use as the membrane support of thin film composite polyamide membranes. Several functional mixed matrix membranes based on graphene oxide, metal-organic frameworks, Y-zeolites etc. have been prepared for the separation of aqueous organic solution by pervaporation and gasoline sulfur removal. Especially, self-cleaning electrocatalytic membrane reactor based on TiO₂ loading carbon membrane as anode and integrated processes have been developed for the industrial wastewater and landfilled leachate treatment. In addition, this talk will introduce a novel tree-like electro-spun nanofiber-based membrane for air filtration and reinforced perovskite hollow fiber membranes for oxygen separation. Finally, several commercialized cases including dye wastewater treatment, municipal sewage treatment etc. will be discussed.