Desalination Process via Pervaporation of Wetland Saline Water

Abstract

Water is a very important resource for life on earth. Nowadays, water scarcity is a big issue around the world. Especially people who live in wetland areas, river is an important water source for their daily life. Unfortunately, the water becomes salty due to seawater intrusion into the river. The objective of this work is to apply desalination via pervaporation process of wetland saline water using pure silica membranes employ TEOS (tetraethyl orthosilicate) as a precursor. A two-step acid-base catalysed method has been applied to produce silica sols. The pure silica membranes were calcined under RTP (Rapid Thermal Process) method at 600°C for 1 hour. The various temperatures (20, 40 & 60 °C have been set in pervaporation set up in order to investigate the performance of silica membranes. It was found that at high temperature, silica membranes start to densify and give the lowest rejection compare to lower temperatures (84.9 %). In contrary, there was 100% of water flux increases when the feed temperature increases (from 0.61 to 1.19 kg m-2 h-1)