A Facile Approach for Elimination of Electroneutral/Anionic Organic Dyes from Water Using a Developed Carbon-Based Polymer Nanocomposite Membrane

Abstract

As a tool for mitigating water scarcity, membrane technologies have attracted much attention in the field of industrial effluent treatment. Notably, standard membranes suffer rejection issues that lead to short membrane life and high operational costs. Thus, better rejection-resistant materials (e.g., polyethersulfone (PES) membrane blended with carboxylated multi-walled carbon nanotubes (carboxylated-MWCNT)) have been developed via a phase-inversion process. Fabricated nanocomposite membranes are characterized in terms of physico-chemical characteristics and permeation properties. The removal performance of nanocomposite membranes is evaluated via the filtration of 1000 mg/L electroneutral bromothymol blue and anionic methyl orange dyes. According to the results, the optimum blending of 0.2 wt% carboxylated-MWCNTs exhibits an increase in surface properties and thermo-mechanical properties. Moreover, carboxylated-MWCNT/PES nanocomposites exhibit the highest pure-water permeability at 20.0 L/m2.h.bar and superior removal of dyes (greater than 95%) with different charges at an operating pressure of 3 bar. The carboxylated-MWCNTs/PES are promising nanocomposite membranes that exhibit favorable removal performance when dealing with industrial effluent.