Design and fabrication of novel nanofiber membranes via electrospinning technique for membrane distillation
In recent decades, many regions of the world suffer from water scarcity, which is one of the most critical issues in the world. The aim of this study is the development of suitable electrospun nanofiber membranes for MD. This study mainly focuses on the newly-developed one-dimensional and two-dimensional nano-materials embedded nanofiber membranes, which suffer less wetting issue and have improved water vapor flux performance in MD. It also investigates a simple surface modification technique to generate anti-wetting property on the membrane surface. Overall, this author successfully fabricated several electrospun nanofiber membranes with enhanced water vapor flux and stable salt rejection performances for the treatment of seawater, seawater RO brine and CSG RO brine by MD applications. The fabricated electrospun nanofiber membranes exhibited better performances than the commercial PVDF membranes due to their suitable morphologies and characteristics for MD application. Thus, proper membranes were fabricated which led to enhanced membrane properties such as superhydrophobicity and anti-wetting property. And their MD performances have been compared with the ones in the previous reports. This study may therefore contribute to future MD researches regarding using electrospinning for the developments of a commercial electrospun nanofiber MD membrane.
Electrospun nanofiber membranes., Desalination., Microfiltration membranes.
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