Calculation on phase diagrams of polyetherimide/ N,N-dimethylacetamide/H₂O-BuOH casting system and their relevance to membrane performances

Abstract

The ternary phase diagrams of polyetherimide (PEI)/N,N-dimethylacetamide (DMAc) with H₂O and BuOH as non-solvent were simulated using solubility parameter and Flory-Huggins theory. The phase diagrams show that 5.5% H₂O/BuOH system containing 5% BuOH and 0.5% H₂O, or 6.5% H₂O/BuOH system containing 6.2% BuOH and 0.3% H₂O is required to induce liquid-liquid demixing for 20 wt-% PEI/DMAc casting solution. Therefore, BuOH can enhance the phase separation of the PEI casting solution and hereby induce higher porosity of the membrane, and the diffusion of BuOH into the water coagulation bath causes larger pore size easily compared with DMAc. Our predictions that the membrane pure water flux first increases then decreases, and the rejection ratio of bovine serum albumin decreases with the increasing concentration of BuOH were validated by the experiments using the prepared membranes.

Key words： phase diagram; solubility parameter; interaction parameter; ultrafiltration; Flory-Huggins theory

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the financial support of National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars of China (21125628), the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (2012AA03A611), Science and Technology plan projects of Liaoning Province of China (2011224005) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (DUT11ZD112).

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