Development of membrane testing protocols for characterisation of RO and NF membranes

The CSIRO Flagship Cluster project Advanced Membrane Technologies for Water Treatment is a collaboration of nine Australian Universities and the CSIRO looking at improving the energy efficiency of desalination of seawater using membrane processes. One of the initial aims of the cluster is to develop a standardised suite of tools and techniques for the characterisation of membranes for seawater desalination. Measures used to assess membrane separations are speed, selectivity and stability. These three performance measures depend upon the physical and chemical properties of the membrane, the feedwater and the type of filtration process being used (i.e. Dead end batch filtration versus continuous crossflow filtration). Our proposed testing protocol will cover three main categories; transport properties, pore characteristics and surface properties. The transport properties of membranes are strongly related to the pore and surface characteristics, however no general predictive capability exists yet that is widely accepted in the literature.