Novel Translucent Hollow Fiber Polyvinylidene Fluoride Photocatalytic Membrane for Highly Efficient Oil-produced Wastewater Treatment: The Role of Translucency on Degradation Efficiency

01.Aug.2023

​A novel method, Thermally Modified Non-Solvent Induced Phase Separation (T-NIPS) has been developed to fabricate translucent hollow fiber (THF) photocatalytic membrane for membrane’s photodegradation efficiency enhancement. The process involves two-step temperature treatment that attacks crystalline property of polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF). Graphitic carbon nitride in a modified morphological structure (hollow nanofiber) was used as photocatalyst to investigate the effect of translucency on membrane’s photodegradation efficiency. UV-Vis analysis coupled with FTIR highlighted different crystalline phase appearance and membrane’s translucency. The membranes showed high translucency, ranging from 60.0% to 93.9%, with THF-PVDF/PVP-GCN (2.0) exhibiting the highest. The filtration experiment showed that membrane with GCN photocatalyst had high PWF (1200 L/m2h) and rejection (90%) OPW compared to neat THF-PVDFs. In suspended mode, GCN demonstrated an impressive photodegradation efficiency of 99.98%. When immobilized in opaque PVDF membrane, the photodegradation has decreased substantially to 49.40%. However, when immobilized in a translucent PVDF membrane, the photodegradation efficiency of HN-GCN significantly improved compared to the opaque PVDF membrane, reaching 95%. Translucent membrane was subjected to five cycle regeneration test and showed 90% recovery even after the fifth cycle. The 10% reduction in the recovery was investigated using FESEM analysis revealed that there is a cake layer formation on the membrane surface. Therefore, this study proved that translucency of membrane has significant effect on immobilized photocatalyst’s photocatalytic efficiency.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/373233426_Novel_Translucent_Hollow_Fiber_Polyvinylidene_Fluoride_Photocatalytic_Membrane_for_Highly_Efficient_Oil-produced_Wastewater_Treatment_The_Role_of_Translucency_on_Degradation_Efficiency​