Conductive thin film nanocomposite forward osmosis membrane (TFN-FO) blended with carbon nanoparticles for membrane fouling control.

Membrane fouling in forward osmosis (FO) significantly affects water flux and membrane life, which restricts the further development of FO. In this work, carbon nanoparticles were blended in polyethersulfone (PES) to prepare a conductive thin film nanocomposite (TFN) FO membrane to control the membrane fouling in FO processes. The membrane containing 4 wt% carbon exhibited an optimum performance with water flux of 14.0 and 17.2 LMH for FO (active layer for FS) and PRO (active layer for DS) modes, respectively, using DI water as feed solution and 1 M NaCl as draw solution and electrical conductivity of 170.1 mS/m. Dynamic antifouling experiments showed that, compared with no voltage applied, the water flux decline of surface charged TFN-FO membrane was significantly retarded. For CaSO4, BSA and LYS as model contaminants, the water fluxes were improved by 31%, 13% and 7% under the voltages of +1.7 V, -1.7 V and +1.7 V, respectively. Moreover, the charged membrane is more effective in relieving the initial membrane fouling, and contaminant-contaminant interactions mechanism dominates the formation of further membrane fouling processes. Therefore, for contaminants with different charge conditions, customizing membrane surface charges is a feasible and promising approach for controlling membrane fouling in situ method.