Authors

Abstract

In this paper we studied the synthesis of polymer membrane materials and their characterization by various techniques such as Attenuated total reflectance Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR), CHNS/O analysis, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and performance in the form of volumetric flux and salt rejection. Herewith we have discussed about these techniques simply in details. The techniques are discussed as follows along with examples. Herewith we used polysulfone (PSf) membrane as a support membrane for our studies and we use all aforementioned techniques for polymer membrane characterizations. Thin film composite (TFC) membrane was prepared via interfacial polymerization (IP) on the surface of PSf membrane. The selective layer was prepared by the interfacial polymerization of 1, 3-benzenedithiol (BDT), and trimesoyl chloride (TMC) for water purification and the results have been discussed well in this paper. The result indicated that volumetric flux depends on the hydrophilicity of thin film. BDT 2 wt % and TMC 0.1 wt % solutions were found appropriate for high performance membrane. Such membrane exhibited 98.3 % salt rejection and as high as 79 L m 2 h water flux.

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