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Ceramic membranes are considered superior over their polymeric counterparts for applications at high temperature, pressure, and in aggressive environments with additional advantages of cleaning at high temperature. Preparation of porous ceramic membrane is expensive because the ceramic materials cannot be processed in a liquid state as polymers. Ceramic membrane synthesis involved solid powder preparation, consolidation, suspension formation, calcination, and sintering temperature which makes its synthesis very expensive. Geopolymerization is a heterogeneous reaction of aluminosilicate materials and chemical activators to form a three-dimensional structure having high mechanical strength without sintering. The overall percent energy and cost-saving of geopolymeric membranes were compared with conventional ceramic membranes. Recently, the geopolymerization technique has been used for membrane synthesis to replace conventional ceramic membrane synthesis. The objective of this review article is to discuss the potential opportunities and challenges in the synthesis and application of geopolymeric membranes.

Geopolymerization is a green innovative technique for the synthesis of inorganic membrane using fly ash as a raw material. In this work, fly ashes from thermal power plant were used as a source material for the synthesis of sintering-free, self-supported geopolymeric membrane. Geopolymeric slurry was obtained by chemical activation (Na 2 SiO 3 /NaOH = 2.5 and 15 M) of fly ashes (Si/Al = 2.8) after mixing of 30 min with 120 rpm. Compressive strength of 18.5 MPa was achieved after curing and hydrothermal treatment at 90°C for 24 h with the average pore size of 0.4-0.3 µm. Flux of different range 10, 14, 20, 26, and 29 L h-1 m-2 was obtained at driving pressure of 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 bar respectively. Flux decline for produced water through prepared membrane were investigated after 60 s. Parametric studies of produced water from oil and gas production facility were also investigated before and after treatment.

In building development, concrete is world most reliable, durable and versatile in construction materials. However, the heating and cooling system of the building is influenced by outside temperature due to extreme weather or areas condition leads to the consumption of a lot of electrical power. Thermally insulated concretes represent alternative construction materials to improve the thermal efficiency in building development. Various construction materials have different thermal insulation properties and thus, their suitability for various conditions vary. Thermal insulation properties are generally identified through specific heat, thermal conductivity, thermal diffusivity, thermal expansion, and mass loss. This paper present review the thermal insulation properties of variations insulated concrete are presently in growing demand of researchers to comfort and resolve prescribed issues related to insulated concrete in enhancing thermal insulation properties as a passive energy saving building.

Quest for alternate energy sources is the core of most of the research activities these days. No matter how small or large amount of energy can be produced by utilizing the non-conventional techniques and sources, every bit of innovation can reshape the future of energy. In this work, experimental analysis of the thermoelectric (TE) properties of bulk-graphene in the temperature range of (303 to 363) K is presented. Graphene powder was pressed to form a pellet which was used to fabricate the TE device. The effects of temperature on the Seebeck coefficient, electrical and thermal conductivities, and the dimensionless figure of merit (FOM) were measured. The increasing value of the Seebeck coefficient (thermopower) with temperature is indicant of the metallic behavior. Additionally, the observed thermopower (TEP) is positive, which shows that the majority charge carriers are holes and peaked to a value of 56 μV K−1 at 363 K. The thermopower of the pellet is four times larger than the previously reported values for single layer graphene (SLG) and few layer graphene (FLG). In addition to this, low values of the thermal conductivity were observed for the pellet which is one of the requirements of a good TE material. Besides this, an upward trend is observed with increasing temperature for FOM, which attains a peak value of 0.0016 at 363 K, which is almost ten times that of the previously reported values.