Effect of the surface charge of monodisperse particulate foulants on cake formation

In microfiltration and ultrafiltration, particulate foulants are inevitably deposited on the membrane surface, forming a cake whose structure and behaviour play crucial roles in the subsequent filterability of the suspensions. This study investigated the impact of fouling by three types of latex particulate foulants, which were of the same size (3 µm) but with different surface charges. Surprisingly, although the positively charged aminated latex was expected to perform the worst in the flux-decline experiments due to attractive electrostatic interaction with the negatively charged membrane, this latex displayed the best performance relative to the two negatively charged latex. To understand these counter-intuitive results, a novel network model (Han et al., 2017) [1] and three-dimensional (3D) optical coherence tomography (OCT) image analysis (Li et al., 2016) [2] were employed to reveal the underlying reasons for the different fouling behaviors. Two mechanisms were found to contribute to the worse performance of the negatively charged latex. Firstly, these particles tended to deposit on the pore rather than non-pore region of the membrane due to the repulsive particle-membrane electrostatic interactions, which led to a more complete pore blockage and thereby greater initial cake resistance. Secondly, these particles had a greater tendency to cluster and deposit on other deposited latex due to similarly repulsive particle-membrane and particle-particle interactions, which led to a more inhomogeneous cake and thereby greater specific cake resistance.