A facile method for simulating randomly rough membrane surface associated with interface behaviors

摘要

Modeling rough surfaces has emerged as a distinct discipline of considerable research interest in interface behaviors including membrane fouling. In this paper, a facile method was proposed to simulate rough membrane surface morphology. Natural membrane surface was found to be randomly rough, and its height distribution obeys Gaussian distribution. A new method which combines spectrum method, Gaussian distribution and Fourier transform technique was deduced. Simulation of the rough membrane surface showed high similarity in terms of statistical roughness and height distribution between the simulated surface and the real membrane surface, indicating feasibility of the new method. It was found that, correlation length (l) and the number of superposed ridges (N) are key parameters affecting the simulated membrane surface morphology. This new method has evident advantages over conventional modeling methods The proposed method for randomly rough membrane surface modeling could be potentially used to quantify the interfacial interactions between two rough surfaces, giving implications for membrane fouling mitigation. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.