Designing an ideal organic-inorganic membrane for water purfication.

Abstract

Inhibiting biofouling in seawater reverse osmosis (RO) is thought to be an important issue in seawater desalination process. This paper proposes and discusses a hybrid membrane for RO. Inorganic antimicrobial materials such as carbon nanotubes and titanium dioxide were evaluated and silver nanoparticles are thought to have the highest potential amongst them to incorporate into RO membrane. Impregnation methods such as deposition-precipitation, wet impregnation, and solvent extraction were also discussed. It is suggested that silver can be coated on RO membrane via wet impregnation followed by deposition-precipitation method to ensure high loading of silver. A review on the paper “Application of nanosilver surface modification to RO membrane and spacer for mitigating biofouling in seawater desalination” was done to show the better performance in silver nanoparticles coated membrane compared to unmodified membrane in terms of the membrane’s permeate flux, total dissolved solids rejection and microbial count.