Abstract:
Urbanization, unexpected population expansion, an increase in daily comfort
requirements and climate change have lead increased demand for safe drinking water
over the last decade, resulting in water shortages. As a result of these concerns and the
increasing demand for fresh water, it is important to develop practical water treatment
technologies that are low in operating costs and high in efficiency in order to overcome
this problem. Numerous solutions are being investigated to address these challenges;
desalination is the most efficient one. Desalination is a process that removes salts from
water to provide clean drinking water, it is considered as a key solution to water scarcity.
While conventional desalination technologies such as multi-effect distillation
(MED), electrodialysis (ED), multistage flash evaporation (MSF), pervaporation,
forward osmosis (FO) and reverse osmosis (RO) membrane processes have been widely
implemented and have achieved excellent results but they are considered to be pressure
intensive, energy intensive, and relatively inefficient. Membrane desalination has
emerged as the most attractive desalination technique.
The purpose of this research is to fabricate thin film Nano composite membranes based
on metal organic frameworks (MOFs) for sea water desalination. MOFs were chosen due
to their obvious advantages of having a large surface area and versatility to a variety of
applications. This thesis is primarily concerned with the fabrication of thin film
Nanocomposite membranes (TFN) based on UiO66/UiO66-SO3H in order to enhance the
performance of NaCl separation from water. Due of its high chemical stability and
hydrophilic nature, UiO66 is a frequently used metal organic framework. UiO66/UiO66-
SO3H nanoparticles were chosen and synthesised for this thesis because of their high
chemical and thermal stability, as well as their hydrophilicity. PAN was used as a support
to fabricate membranes consisting of UiO66/UiO66-SO3H. A number of characterization
techniques were used to confirm the purity and performance of nanoparticles and
membranes. Performance of membranes was evaluated using a dead end nanofiltration
cell.
