High-Performance Reverse Osmosis Membrane Enabled by Nanofillers and Surface Modification

Abstract

With the rising demand for sustainably producing fresh water from saline sources, many researchers have been attracted to develop new reverse osmosis (RO) membranes with high water flux and salt rejection. Despite the great achievements researchers have made, there is still significant room for improving the water permeability and salt rejection of an RO membrane. Herein, we fabricated a RO membrane of advanced 3-layer structure and better performance both in anti-fouling and in water flux. This advanced membrane contains three layers with different modifications. The first modification was done by embedding zeolite and graphene oxide (GO) in the selective polyamide (PA) layer to introduce water flux channel. The second modification was an additional GO layer on the PA surface working as an anti-fouling layer. For final modification, we added a polyethylene glycol (PEG) layer which could serve to repel the organic foulant. The water permeability, salt rejection property, and anti-fouling ability of this new membrane have been investigated. We concluded that the combination of these structures led to an overall excellent RO performance which was supported by our experimental results.