posted on 2018-11-21, 00:00authored bySang Hee Park, Yeo Jin Kim, Soon Jin Kwon, Min Gyu Shin, Seung Eun Nam, Young Hoon Cho, You In Park, Jeong F. Kim, Jung-Hyun Lee
Organic solvent nanofiltration
(OSN) has made significant advances
recently, and it is now possible to fabricate thin film composite
(TFC) membranes with a selective layer thickness below 10 nm that
gives ultrafast solvent permeance. However, such high permeance is
inadvertently limited by the support membrane beneath the selective
layer, and thus there is an urgent need to develop a suitable support
to maximize TFC performance. In this work, we employed a commercially
available polyethylene (PE) battery separator as a porous support
to fabricate high performance TFC OSN membranes. To deposit a uniform
polyamide selective layer onto the porous support via interfacial
polymerization, the PE support was hydrophilized with O2 plasma and the reaction efficiency was optimized using a surfactant.
Owing to the high surface porosity of the PE support and the high
permselectivity of the PA layer, the PE-supported TFC membrane outperformed
the previously reported OSN membranes and its performance exceeded
the current performance upper bound. A solvent activation step dramatically
improved the solvent permeance by 5-fold while maintaining nanoseparation
properties. In addition to the superior OSN performance, the commercial
availability of the PE support and simplified TFC fabrication protocol
would make the PE-supported OSN membranes commercially attractive.