PVDF membrane for oil-in-water separation via cross-flow ultrafiltration process

Abstract

The objective of this study is to investigate the potential of ultrafiltration polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF)-titanium dioxide (TiO2) membrane for oil-in-water separator. PVDF polymeric matrix membrane is excellent in term of chemical and thermal stabilities, which make it very promising to be used as a membrane matrix for water separation. However, poor hydrophilic property of the PVDF has led to the severe fouling during operation. Thus, current work was performed to investigate the effect of incorporation of two additives i.e. polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) and polyethylene glycol (PEG) in PVDF-TiO2 membrane, which fabricated using dry/wet phase inversion technique. Membranes characterizations were performed using field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM), atomic force microscopy (AFM), contact angle and UV-vis spectrophotometer. Accordingly, modified PVDF membrane possessed good hydrophilicity property when the additives were added into PVDF-TiO2 membrane matrix. In term of filtration performance, the experimental results showed that oil rejection using PVDF-TiO2/PVP membrane were ~99.7%, which met the requirement for discharge. On the other hand, PVDF-TiO2/PEG membrane was shown more enhancement in terms of permeate flux by given over 64 (L/m2h) at pressure of 2 bar gauge.