Fabrication of high-performance pervaporation composite membrane for alkaline wastewater reclamation

Abstract

Pervaporation desalination has a unique advantage to recycle concentrated salt solutions. The merit can be applied to treat alkaline wastewater if the membrane has superior alkali-resistance. In this paper, we used polyethylene microfiltration membrane as the substrate and deposited a glutaraldehyde crosslinked sodium carboxymethylcellulose layer by spray-coating. Pervaporation flux of the composite membrane reached 35 ± 2 kg·m^–2·h^–1 with a sodium chloride rejection of 99.9% ± 0.1% when separating a 3.5 wt-% sodium chloride solution at 70 °C. The desalination performance was stable after soaking the membrane in a 20 wt-% NaOH solution at room temperature for 9 d and in a 10 wt-% NaOH solution at 60 °C for 80 h. Moreover, the membrane was stable in 4 wt-% sulfuric acid and a 500 mg·L⁻¹ sodium hypochlorite solution. In a process of concentrating a NaOH solution from 5 to 10 wt-% at 60 °C, an average water flux of 23 kg·m^–2·h^–1 with a NaOH rejection over 99.98% was obtained.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

pervaporation / alkaline solution concentration / polyethylene membrane / acid resistance / chlorine tolerance

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Acknowledgments

This research is funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51773011).

Electronic Supplementary Material

Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11705-021-2078-2 and is accessible for authorized users.

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