Membranes adsorber from oil palm empty fruit branches (OPEFB): preparation and fabrication

Oil Palm empty fruit branches (OPEFB) are solid waste that are numerous produced from palm oil mills. OPEFB is economically and potentially used as membrane adsorber material due to has good thermal stability, chemical resistance and biodegradability. The objectives of this work is to preparate and fabricate the OPEFB membrane adsorber which is activated by physical activation. The OPEFB has been cleaned and dried, subsequently heated at 500 °C for 30 min via pyrolysis. The activated OPEFB was sieved using 200-400 mesh and followed by the addition of 2-propanol, NH4Cl, polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) and polyethylene glycol (PEG) to become a mixture. The activated OPEFB ratio were varied in the mixtures to obtain the best composition in order to produce a good membrane adsorber texture for casting. FTIR shows on wavenumber at 1082 cm−1 indicates that there is O-H stretching functional groups and bands at 943 cm−1 correspons to C=O functional group. It is concluded that the membrane mixtures can be employed as membrane adsorber due to carbon content which creates strong matrix applied for gas separation.

Membrane adsorber with hierarchically porous HKUST-1 immobilized in membrane pores by flowing synthesis

A membrane adsorber with hierarchically porous HKUST-1 (HP-HKUST-1) immobilized in membrane pores has been fabricated by flowing synthesis. The XRD characteristics indicated that the structure integrity of the HP-HKUST-1 immobilized in the membrane pores can be kept after template agent removed. Other characteristics presented by XPS, FTIR, SEM, TEM and BET proved the effective immobilization of HP-HKUST-1 in membrane pores. Compared with hydrothermal HKUST-1 powder, the adsorption capacity for Congo red and Methylene blue adsorption can be increased several times by hydrothermal HP-HKUST-1 powder, owing to the mesopores with rich active sites for adsorption. When the solution was flowed through the membrane adsorber, the adsorption rate for these adsorbates increased significantly, owing to the enhanced mass transfer in the confined space of the membrane pores with micro or nano scale. After going through seven adsorption-desorption experiments, the membrane adsorber with HP-HKUST-1 immobilized in membrane pores shows a remarkable repeatability.

Adsorption of Natural Organic Matter and Phosphorus from Surface Water Using Heated Aluminum Oxide (Predeposited) Dynamic Membrane Adsorber

The paper reports the removal of phosphorus and natural organic matter (NOM) from surface water by dynamic membrane (DM) adsorber. DM filter builds up as a layer of particles deposited via permeation through the membrane’s surface. This study reports the application of Heated Aluminium Oxide Particles (HAOPs) as a dynamic membrane adsorber. Filtration experiments were conducted with surface water and batch tests were carried out with synthetic water. The efficiency of phosphorus removal along with the efficiency of organics (represented as UV-254) removal was evaluated. Additionally, the impact of HAOPs surface loading on the changes of transmembrane pressure (TMP), the kinetics, isotherm modeling of the adsorption and the effect of the pH, the effect of ionic strength, the effect of coexisting organic matter on phosphorus removal efficiency were studied. In the case of phosphorus removal in batch adsorption experiments, its sorption kinetic and isotherm data were analyzed using pseudo-first- and pseudo-second-order models and Langmuir and Freundlich models, respectively. The results indicated that Langmuir adsorption isotherm fits the experimental data best (0.9894). The kinetics of phosphorus adsorption on HAOPs was best described by the pseudo-second-order model and the best removal was achieved at the pH 6–7 (96.65% on average). An increase in ionic strength did not impact the efficiency of phosphorus removal significantly. The outcome of this study highlights HAOPs efficiency in NOM removal up to 92% in filtration experiments. In the case of phosphorous, removal efficiency varied. For the highest HAOPs dose, the degree of phosphorus removal ranged up to 93 ± 5%. The same removal efficiency was observed for the lowest dose while for 17 g/m2 of HAOPs the fluctuations were larger and varied from 64.7% to 92%. The results demonstrate that HAOPs could potentially be applied in the removal of phosphorus from surface water, especially when there is a high concentration of phosphorus in the water. However, this process requires further research and optimization of its parameters.