Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
6, 698-702
DOI 10.1007/s12221-012-0698-3
Introduction
Many countries and cities around the world suffer from a
scarcity of fresh water. Due to increasing population rates
and enhanced living standards, increasing amounts of fresh
water will be required. The oceans are a major water reservoir
for the earth. The earths water is seawater. The ratio is about
97 % with the remaining 2 % locked in glaciers and icecaps.
Readily available sources of fresh water account for less
than 0.5 % of the earths total water supply [1].
The desalination processes has been classified into two
major categories: (1) thermal (phase change) (2) membrane
separation process. Some of the thermal processes include
MED, TVC, MSF, and MVC technologies. Membrane based
processes include reverses osmosis (RO), and electro
dialysis(ED). However, membrane distillation lies between
the membrane and thermal process [2,3].
Currently, many countries use reverse osmosis (RO)
operations to treat brackish water. However, RO plants typically
recover only 70-75 % of the feed water, and the remaining
25-30 % is saline or brine and RO concentrate. Otherwise,
RO concentrate must find a disposal route. In this situation,
one possible remedy to increase water recovery is by passing
the RO concentrate through an additional process such as
membrane distillation (MD) desalination technology [4,5].
Membrane distillation is a new seawater desalination
technology, and its future is encouraging. The driving force
for desalination is the difference in temperature either side of
Experiment
Preparation of the Electrospun Membrane and the
Optimum Conditions
PVDF (Mw 275,000) and PVDF-co-HFP (Mw 55,000)
699
Membranes
Characterization
Average diameter (m)
Porosity (%)
Thickness (mm)
Basis weight (g/m2)
Water contact angle (o)
PVDF
PVDF-co-HFP
220
95
0.228
19.2
125
173
90
0.055
13.52
128
700
Ching-Iuan Su et al.
701
(1)
702
Conclusion
We employed PVDF-co-HFP to prepare water using
electrospinning and successfully applied it in a direct contact
membrane distillation (DCMD) system. From this 12-hour
experiment, the salt rejection of PVDF-co-HFP (99.9901 %)
was better than that of the PVDF composite membrane
(99.9888 %) and was almost the same as that of the PTFE
commercial membrane (99.9951 %). Consequently, the PVDFco-HFP composite nanofibrous membrane significantly
increased the permeation flux and salt rejection compared to
the PVDF composite nanofibrous membrane in the DCMD
system.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank the Department of Industrial
Technology, Ministry of Econmic Affairs, and National
Ching-Iuan Su et al.
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