3 research outputs found
Waste-to-Resource Strategy To Fabricate Highly Porous Whisker-Structured Mullite Ceramic Membrane for Simulated Oil-in-Water Emulsion Wastewater Treatment
Industrial waste coal fly ash, containing
hazardous metal oxides,
poses potential threats to the environment and humans. Efficient recycling
of such kind of solid state waste is highly desired yet still challenging.
This work addressed waste-to-resource fabrication of a highly porous
whisker-structured mullite ceramic membrane for separation of simulated
oil-in-water emulsion wastewater by recycling of waste fly ash and
natural bauxite with addition of WO<sub>3</sub>. The formation and
characterizations of membranes were systematically studied including
reaction mechanism, dynamic sintering behavior, open porosity, mechanical
property, pore size distribution, microstructure, and pure water flux.
The results show mullite formation temperature was decreased about
100 °C with addition of 20 wt % WO<sub>3</sub>, whereas open
porosity significantly increased with WO<sub>3</sub> content due to
the formation of a highly porous interlocked whisker structure. Even
without any pore formers, interestingly, the membrane with addition
of 20 wt % WO<sub>3</sub> possessed an open porosity as high as 51.9
± 0.3% after sintering at a high temperature of 1400 °C
whereas its mechanical strength (68.7 ± 6.1 MPa) was still improved.
An oil-in-water emulsion dead-end microfiltration experiment indicates
a significantly improved oil rejection as high as 99% was also obtained
for W20 membrane, as compared to that (83%) of the W0 membrane
Datesets for paper "Electroregulation of graphene-nanofluid interactions to co-enhance water permeation and ion rejection in vertical graphene membranes"
 This dataset contains the raw data source for the figure plots shown in the main manuscript entitled "Electroregulation of graphene-nanofluid interactions to co-enhance water permeation and ion rejection in vertical graphene membranes" </p
Stable superhydrophobic ceramic-based carbon nanotube composite desalination membranes
Membrane distillation (MD) is a promising process for the treatment of highly saline wastewaters. The central component of MD is a stable porous hydrophobic membrane with a large liquid–vapor interface for efficient water vapor transport. A key challenge for current polymeric or hydrophobically modified inorganic membranes is insufficient operating stability, resulting in some issues such as wetting, fouling, flux, and rejection decline. This study presents an overall conceptual design and application strategy for a superhydrophobic ceramic–based carbon nanotube (CNT) desalination membrane having specially designed membrane structures with unprecedented operating stability and MD performance. Superporous and superhydrophobic surface structures with CNT networks are created after quantitative regulation of in situ grown CNT. The fully covered CNT layers (FC–CNT) exhibit significantly improved thermally and superhydrophobically stable properties under an accelerated stability test. Due to the distinctive structure of the superporous surface network, providing a large liquid–vapor superhydrophobic interface and interior finger-like macrovoids, the FC–CNT membrane exhibits a stable high flux with a 99.9% rejection of Na+, outperforming existing inorganic membranes. Under simple and nondestructive electrochemically assisted direct contact MD (e-DCMD), enhanced antifouling performance is observed. The design strategy is broadly applicable to be extended toward fabrication of high performance membranes derived from other ceramic or inorganic substrates and additional applications in wastewater and gas treatment