Thin Film Nanocomposite Membranes Filled with Metal Organic Frameworks for Water Desalination

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.