Abstract:
Biofouling is an inevitable phenomenon in membranes during water treatment
processes and it is important to remove biofouling so that membranes can be
saved from degradation during longer run operations. The biofouling occurs due
to growth of microorganisms on the surface of membranes that results in blocking
of pores causing decline in flux and separation of membranes. Therefore, it is
important to remove from the surfaces to save them from degradation and
enhancing. their performance. Several approaches were practiced enhancing the
physiochemical properties of membranes like fabrication of composite membranes
that can provide properties of two materials which are compatible to each other.
This approach improves the performance of membranes dramatically, but it still
did not completely address the biofouling removal issue. So, it is necessary to
develop such materials that are resistant to fouling and kills microorganisms on
the surfaceso that they cannot grow anymore and can be removed by performing
simple cleaning steps. However, developing membranes that have antibacterial
properties was a challenge which was resolved by adding nanomaterials in the
composite membranes. Therefore, it was necessary to develop materials that had
antibacterial properties and also compatible to the polymers. So, cuprous oxide
nanoparticles that had antibacterial properties and thus have a good bonding with
PVA polymer was tried to make dense selective layer on a PSF micro-porous
support. Hence, the fabricated membranes were used to measure flux and salt
rejection properties. This study explains the synthesis and characterization of
cuprous oxide nanoparticleswith various shapes and sizes and then incorporated
into PVA nanocomposite membranes to impact the performance of these
membranes. Design of experiments were made to study the different reaction
conditions impacting the size of NPs. The results shows that the NPs were
successfully prepared of spherical and cubical shape having a hydrodynamic
size of 180 ± 10 nm and 680 ± 20 nm, respectively with positive surface
charge.
