Design of nanofibre interlayer supported forward osmosis composite membranes and its evaluation in fouling study with cleaning

Highlights

• A fine fibre (40–60 nm diameter) interlayer (~1 µm thickness) was electrospun.

• Fine fibre interlayer promoted formation of defect-free dense polyamide layer.

• FO membrane with dual-layer substrate had less organic fouling potential.

• High reverse salt flux accelerated organic fouling on FO membrane.

Abstract

Nanofibre-supported forward osmosis (FO) membranes have gained popularity owing to their low structural parameters and high water flux. However, the nanofibrous membranes are less stable in long-term use, and their fouling behaviours with foulants in both feed solution (FS) and draw solution (DS) is less studied. This study developed a nanofibrous thin-film composite (TFC) FO membrane by designing a tiered dual-layer nanofibrous substrate to enhance membrane stability during long-term usage and cleaning. Various characterisation methods were used to study the effect of the electrospun nanofibre interlayer and drying time, which is the interval after removing the M-phenylenediamine (MPD) solution and before reacting with trimesoyl chloride (TMC) solution, on the intrinsic separation FO performance. The separation performance of the dual-layer nanofibrous FO membranes was examined using model foulants (sodium alginate and bovine serum albumin) in both the FS and DS. The dual-layer nanofibrous substrate was superior to the single-layer nanofibrous substrate and showed a flux of 30.2 L/m²/h (LMH) when using 1.5 mol/L NaCl against deionised (DI) water in the active layer facing draw solution (AL-DS) mode. In the fouling test, the water flux was effectively improved without sacrificing the water/solute selectivity under the condition that foulants existed in both the FS and DS. In addition, the dual-layer nanofibrous TFC FO membrane was more robust during the fouling test and cleaning.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

Forward osmosis / Electro-spinning / Interfacial polymerisation / Fouling / Polyvinylidene fluoride

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Conflicts of Interest

There are no conflicts to declare.

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 52100105), the Natural Science Foundation of Shaanxi Province (China) (No. 2021JQ-108). The authors would like to thank the Singapore Membrane Technology Center of Nanyang Technological University for supporting pore size characterization.

Electronic Supplementary Material

Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11783-022-1550-7 and is accessible for authorized users.

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