Ceramic-supported thin film composite membrane for organic solvent nanofiltration

The commercial success of membrane-based separation processes related to water treatment has helped launch an emergent field of membrane-based organic solvent nanofiltration (OSN). Polyamide, a mainstay selective layer material found in reverse osmosis (RO) thin film composite (TFC) membranes, has demonstrated excellent performance in OSN. RO membranes, however, are built on solvent-intolerant support layers, thus necessitating the use of other types of supporting materials that can operate in solvents without dissolution or swelling. In this work, we demonstrated the formation of a polyamide selective barrier layer in-situ onto a ceramic ultrafiltration (UF) membrane and evaluated the TFC membrane for use in OSN. We selected ceramic tubular UF membranes provided by the Fraunhofer Institute for Ceramic Technologies and Systems (IKTS) as substrates for this work. Some of our best performing membranes demonstrated a pure methanol permeance of 22.9 Lm−2 h−1 bar−1 and dye rejection for methyl orange (327.3 g/mol), acid fuchsin (585.5 g/mol), chlorophyllin (724.2 g/mol) and brilliant blue FCF (792.9 g/mol) of 42.8%, 92.9%, 99.4%, and 94.1%, respectively. This work represents the first time that polyamide selective has been directly formed onto a tubular ceramic membrane and tested for OSN.