Influence of lithium chloride, lithium bromide and lithium fluoride additives on performance of polyethersulfone membranes and its application in the treatment of palm oil mill effluent

In this study three different types of lithium halides; lithium bromide (LiBr), lithium chloride (LiCl) and lithium fluoride (LiF) were used as additives in the making of polyethersulfone (PES) membranes. The concentration of PES is kept constant at 20 wt.% throughout the study, and the lithium halide concentration is varied in the range of 1–5 wt %. The solvent used is N, N-dimethylformamide and the PES asymmetric membrane was prepared by the dry/wet phase inversion process. Membrane performance was characterized in terms of pure water permeation (PWP), permeation rate (PR) and solute separation of polyethylene glycol (PEG) solution of various molecular weights ranging from 600 to 35,000 Da. The molecular weight cut off (MWCO) and mean pore size distribution were subsequently determined. Results revealed that the 3 wt.% LiBr exhibits the best performance with MWCO at 90% rejection in the range of 2.83 kDa and high flux range of 117.69 L m− 2 h− 1. Hollow fibers spun from the dope solutions containing LiBr revealed that they are capable of treating palm oil mill effluent (POME) with reduction in turbidity, chemical oxygen demand (COD) and biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) of 96.7%, 53.12% and 76.7% respectively.