Rational design and synthesis of molecular-sieving, photocatalytic, hollow fiber membranes for advanced water treatment applications

Abstract

Please refer to published version for the most recent bibliographic citation information. If a published version is known of, the repository item page linked to above, will contain details on accessing it.

Highly permeable Al2O3 microfiltration membranes with holey interior structure achieved through sacrificial C particles

“…Secondly, with the increase in the number of holes of the intermediate layer, the thickness of the top layer is becoming smaller, which reduces the resistance to water flow even further . Last but not least, the holes in the intermediate layer have little resistance to water flow . Therefore, an increase in the number of holes in the intermediate layer can give rise to the increase in the water flux of the whole membranes.…”

“…23,28,29 Last but not least, the holes in the intermediate layer have little resistance to water flow. 16,30,31 Therefore, an increase in the number of holes in the intermediate layer can give rise to the increase in the water flux of the whole membranes. However, too holey an interior structure will weaken the strength of the intermediate layer, thereby reducing the mechanical strength of the whole membrane.…”

Interlayer-free Glucose Carbonised Template Silica Membranes for Brine Water Desalination

“…Fourier Transform Infra-Red (FTIR) was performed to analyze the functional group on the compound, a silica xerogel sample. The siloxane and siloxane groups are known to affect the pore size of the membrane, since the purpose of making this xerogel is to be used as thin film membrane coating, so it is important to know whether there are two groups [4,9,11,12,14]. From the analysis of FTIR xerogel silica-glucose can be seen in the following Figure 1.…”

Rapid thermally processed hierarchical titania-based hollow fibres with tunable physicochemical and photocatalytic properties

“…However, the conventional thermal calcination is time-intensive and requires a high-temperature sintering process to coalesce the inorganic oxides together to confer desired properties such as mechanical strength and photoactivity. Despite this, TiO2 is known to undergo grain growth and usually a phase transformation from the anatase to rutile phases during the high-temperature thermal process at 400-600 °C for powders [22] or at 700-800 °C for non-powders [2,[23][24][25]. Such changes will significantly decrease the photocatalysis efficiency for the intended purposes.…”

“…The first stage involves a short partial pyrolysis of the polymer binder to form composite of TiO2-carbon HFs, which is then subjected to a second stage RTP protocol to create the hierarchical porous TiO2-carbon HFs, where the TiO2 is surface-exposed for photocatalysis whilst the carbonaceous char offers mechanical strength and microporosity as a structural support. In addition, the presence of carbonaceous material has previously been demonstrated to reduce TiO2 aggregation and the phase transformation during high-temperature calcination [30,31]. Therefore, this study systematically investigates the effect of RTP (fast and short temperature-heating protocol) on the mechanophysicochemical and photocatalytic properties of the final composite HFs for the decomposition of organic pollutants in wastewater.…”