Characteristics and Performance of Polysulfone-Polyvinylpyrrolidone Synthetic Hybrid Membrane in Water Purification System

Abstract

Clean water is a fundamental need for human. Whether it is used for recreational purposes, food production, domestic use and drinking, safe and readily available water is important for everyone. Water scarcity is very serious and is one of the most extensive problems affecting people throughout the world. In this study, the emphasis is to fabricate polysulfone-polyvinylpyrrolidone hybrid membrane with different polymer formulation to study the characteristics and morphology in determining the optimum formulation of polysulfone-polyvinylpyrrolidone hybrid membrane. In this study, polysulfone and polyvinylpyrrolidone were used as the polymers and 1-Methyl-2-Pyrrolidone was used as the solvent. The optimum formulation is obtained by conducting the test on the membrane; permeate flux test, salt rejection test and tensile test. The resulted optimum polysulfone-polyvinylpyrrolidone hybrid membrane were undergone two more tests which were Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and wastewater quality test. These two tests were conducted to measure its ability to filter the wastewater and the pore size of membrane were captured. The optimum Membrane is sample4 which had the highest value of permeate flux with 33.78 L/m2hr, it had removal percentage of 11.76% for salt rejection, decreased 12.42% in conductivity from 3.3 S/m to 2.89 S/m, and it was able to withstand 48 kN/m2 at strain value of 3.6 m/m. The optimum sample 4 has formed a microfiltration membrane with average 3.23 μm pore size which is successfully filter out particles in the wastewater, where it could remove 44.27% turbidity, 23.08% TSS, 14.29% COD, 4.73% TDS, 4.79% conductivity, 4.34% pH and 13.04% colour.