Alisa Mehrparvar - Department of Chemical Engineering, Nano Technology Research Institute Mazandaran, University of Technology, Babol
Ahmad Rahimpour
Mohsen Jahanshahi

This study was aimed to prepare hydrophilic ultrafiltration membranes to overcome the fouling problem in waste water treatment systems. Polyehtersulfone was selected as main polymer due to its good properties in membrane structure. Polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) was added to the casting solution as pore former and pore size controller. Hydrophilic agent used in this study was Diaminobenzoic acid (DBA) which is well known for its amine and hydroxyl containing structure. Membranes were prepared by phase inversion-precipitation method. Permeability and flux analysis were held using dead-end filtration cell. Rejection of humic acid (HA) was calculated by measuring absorbance of membrane permeates using UV-spectrophotometer. Common resistance parameters were calculated to check the fouling trend of different prepared membranes. Morphological properties of modified membranes were observed by atomic force microscopy (AFM) scans. Flux measurements showed increment in permeability for both distillated water and humic acid (as a selected model for protein macromolecule) by increasing DBA weight percent while rejection trend did not have unit growth or decrease. Smoother surfaces were obtained by checking the roughness parameters of AFM scans. As a result polyethersulfone ultrafiltration membrane with 8% DBA seemed to show better performance than other membranes

Keywords: hydrophilic, polymeric membranes, fouling, Diaminobenzoic acid