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 WO₃. 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 % WO₃, whereas open porosity significantly increased with WO₃ 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 % WO₃ 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