Preparation and Characterization of Polyamide Based Membranes For Reverse-Osmosis (RO) Technique

摘要

The increasing demand and cost of water have made it imperative for industries to look for appropriate technology to deal this water problem suitably. The reports available in the literature indicated that reverse-osmosis is an economical and efficient technique to produce potable and electronic grade water from saline and brackish water. But in most RO plants, cellulose acetate based membranes are used, which has shown failures in long run due to the hydrolysis and bacteriological attack. Cellulose acetate based RO membranes have also shown poor performance in solution of high pH due to hydrolysis of cellulose acetate. Therefore, other material was also tried but polyamides have shown better results for their applications in fabricating RO membranes. Polyamide based membranes shown high rejection for large pH range and shown high resistance to bacterial and microbial attacks, which made these membranes technologically more effective as well as cost effective. In RO separation process, the solute membrane interactions play effective role in controlling the efficiency of the technique. The polyamide-based membranes provide different interactions than cellulose acetate and other material used in fabrication of RO membranes. The polyamide based membranes have shown high salt rejection due positive interactions of membranes with dissolved salts, hence in the present investigations an effort has been made to fabricate RO membranes with new polyamide and characteristics parameters of membranes were evaluated using brackish water.