The immersion precipitation process makes most commercial polymeric membranes, which enjoy widespread use in water filtration and purification. In this work, a ternary Cahn-Hilliard formulation incorporating a Flory-Huggins homogeneous free energy function is used to model both initial diffusion and the liquid-liquid demixing stage of the immersion precipitation process, which determines much of the final morphology of membranes. Simulations start with a simple non-solvent/solvent/polymer ternary system with periodic boundary conditions and uniform initial conditions with small random fluctuations in 2D. Results in 2D demonstrate the effects of mobilities (Mij) and gradient penalty coefficients (Kij) on phase separation behavior. A two-layer polymer-solvent/non-solvent initial condition is then used to simulate actual membrane fabrication conditions. 2D simulation results demonstrate an asymmetric structure of membrane morphology, which strongly agrees with the experimental observation. A mass transfer boundary condition is developed to model the interaction between the polymer solution and the coagulation bath more efficiently. Simulation results show an asymmetric membrane with connected top layer.
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