• Membrane Journal
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• v.30 no.3
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• pp.158-172
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• 2020

In the aspect of saving energy and water, facilitating the separation membrane for the water treatment has been rising recently as one of the possible solutions. However, microbial biofouling effect is the biggest obstacle that hinders reaching higher permeability over a prolonged period of nanofiltration operation. To solve this problem and fully utilize the filtration membranes with enhanced performance, largely two kinds of solutions are studied and the first and the most commonly mentioned type is the one using the silver nanoparticles. Since silver nanoparticles are important to be well tailored on membrane surface, various methods have been applied and suggested. Using silver nanoparticles however also has the drawbacks or possible toxicity risks, raising the need for other types of utilizing non silver particles to functionalize the membrane, such as copper, graphene or zinc oxides, and amine moieties. Each attempt included in either kind has produced some notable results in killing, preventing, or repelling the bacteria while at the same time, left some unsolved points to be evaluated. In this review, the effects of metal nanoparticles and other materials on the antifouling properties of water treatment membranes are summarized.

• Membrane Journal
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.277-284
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• 2009

In order to select the most suitable membrane to the concentration of vanadium and silica in groundwater, two different commercial NF membrane modules (NE2540-90 and NF90-2540) and three different commercial RO membrane modules (BW30-2540, RE2540-TE, and XLE-2540) were tested. The membrane characteristics test results showed that NE2540-90 module was the most efficient because of higher permeate flux and similar rejection coefficient. Using NE2540-90 module at the transmembrane pressure of $8\;kgf/cm^2$, it was found that the rejection coefficients of vanadium, silica, aluminium, chromium, iron, boron, strontium, and barium were 98.2%, 99.0%, 92.0%, 83.6%, 96.0%, 45.1%, 98.6%, and 69.5%, respectively. It was possible that vanadium and silica contents of groundwater were concentrated into $148.9\;{\mu}g/L$ and 85.8 mg/L respectively by six-stages NF process at the recovery ratio of 15%. The waters produced by NF, which are enriched in vanadium and silica content, are expected to be commercialized the various functional mineral waters.