Fabrication and Characterization of Polymeric Membranes for Dialysis

Abstract

Membrane technology has proven its potential to be considered as an alternative separation technique. Polymeric membranes are fabricated and being used for various separation processes. This work is focused on the synthesis of polymeric membranes for hemodialysis. As Varity of membranes have been developed and being used commercially but their performance needs to be improved. Similarly development of dialysis membranes also is a topic of great interest among membrane technologists. Different polymeric membranes have been developed recently. Cellulose Acetate (CA), is low cost polymer and readily available. In this work Cellulose Acetate (CA) membranes have been fabricated and tested for dialysis applications to lower the membrane cost and enhance its performance. Different membranes were fabricated using Cellulose Acetate (CA) as basic chain polymer that has been dissolved in three different solution forming polymers acetone, acetic acid and formic acid to see the effect of the polymeric solvent on fabricated membranes. As acetic acid and formic acid solutions shows comparatively rapid precipitation than acetone thus these membranes shows good porosity and flux. Moreover PEG is added as a solution modifier. The fabricated membranes were synthesized by using the SEM techniques. SEM micrographs show that PEG enhances the porosity of membranes. The main emphasis in this work was the designing and fabrication of experimental set-up for testing the membrane performance on laboratory scale. A membrane testing apparatus is designed and locally fabricates, to quantify the fluxes through membranes. This cell can work in both batch and continuous mode. And fick’s law is applied to find the values of flux. By using this membrane testing apparatus fluxes of pure water, glucose and urea solutions are measured for dialysis membranes.