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Critical operation factors and proposed testing protocol of nanofiltration membranes for developing advanced membrane materials

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Abstract

Nanofiltration (NF) is an environmental-friendly and energetic-efficient technique for small molecule or ion separations compared to traditional energy-intensive separation processes. However, during the journey to discovering advanced NF membrane materials using a typical dead-end device, there is an obvious discrepancy on testing methodologies/protocols of NF membranes reported in contemporary literatures, which actually results in the significant data-reliability issues. This critical issue made the evaluation of various nanofiltration membranes so confusing and misleading because of the unfair comparison on NF performance. Therefore, it is urgent to guide the membrane society on the real factors affecting the data accuracy and standardize the protocol for nanofiltration test to develop advanced NF membrane materials. In this study, we have carried out a series of designed experiments to unify the standardized separation rate indicators of nanofiltration membranes by comparing flux, permeance, and permeability. The effects of external factors on separation efficiency (rejection) of NF membranes were investigated in detail, which is also analysed and discussed on the basic theory. The dead volume, rotor, and adsorption are proven to be the pivotal indicators for achieving accurate separation efficiency, which offers insight for reliable testing of nanofiltration membranes. Therefore, a protocol was proposed for evaluating accurate separation performance of nanofiltration membranes to obtain the reliable data, which benefits for fair performance comparison to advance NF membrane materials and makes the researchers to better understand the current confusing data reported in the literatures.

Graphical abstract

The accurate testing protocols of NF membranes were clarified, which is important for the development of advanced nanofiltration materials.

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Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (21878062, 22111530113, 21905067), the Natural Science Foundation of Heilongjiang Province for Distinguished Young Scholars (JQ2020B001), Heilongjiang Touyan Team (HITTY-20190033), the State Key Laboratory of Urban Water Resource and Environment (Harbin Institute of Technology) (2020DX02), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2018M640295), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2018YFC0408001), and the Shandong Province Natural Science Foundation (ZR2018BEM031), National Regional Innovation Foundation (2017QYCX09).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. MIIT Key Laboratory of Critical Materials Technology for New Energy Conversion and Storage, School of Chemical Engineering and Technology, State Key Laboratory of Urban Water Resource and Environment (SKLUWRE), Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, 150001, China

    Jun Hui Huang, Ya Dong Wu, Yan Qiu Zhang & Lu Shao

  2. School of Marine Science and Technology, State Key Laboratory of Urban Water Resource and Environment (SKLUWRE), Harbin Institute of Technology, Weihai, 264209, China

    Xi Quan Cheng

  3. School of Environments, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, 150009, China

    Yan Qiu Zhang

  4. Shandong Sino-European Membrane Technology Research Institute Co., Ltd, Weihai, 264209, China

    Xi Quan Cheng

  5. Key Laboratory of Materials Processing and Mold (Zhengzhou University), Ministry of Education, National Engineering Research Center for Advanced Polymer Processing Technology Department of Chemical Engineering, Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, 450002, China

    Song Wei Li

  6. Chemical Engineering School of Engineering, The University of Edinburgh, The King’s Buildings Mayfield Road Edinburgh, Edinburgh, EH9 3JL, UK

    Cher Hon Lau

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  1. Jun Hui Huang
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Jun Hui Huang·and Xi Quan Cheng contributed equally to this work.

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Huang, J.H., Cheng, X.Q., Wu, Y.D. et al. Critical operation factors and proposed testing protocol of nanofiltration membranes for developing advanced membrane materials. Adv Compos Hybrid Mater 4, 1092–1101 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42114-021-00334-w

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