The transport of gases in a supported mesoporous silica membrane

Long-Term Performance and Stability of Interlayer-Free Mesoporous Silica Membranes for Wetland Saline Water Pervaporation

Wetland water is an alternative water resource around wetland areas. However, it is typically saline due to seawater intrusion and contains high natural organic matter (NOM) that is challenging to treat. This study evaluated the stability of interlayer-free mesoporous silica matrix membranes employing a dual acid–base catalyzed sol–gel process for treatment of saline wetland water. The silica sols were prepared under a low silanol concentration, dip-coated in 4 layers, and calcined using the rapid thermal processing method. The membrane performance was initially evaluated through pervaporation under various temperatures (25–60 °C) using various feeds. Next, the long-term stability (up to 400 h) of wetland saline water desalination was evaluated. Results show that the water flux increased at higher temperatures up to 6.9 and 6.5 kg·m⁻²·h⁻¹ at the highest temperature of 60 °C for the seawater and the wetland saline water feeds, respectively. The long-term stability demonstrated a stable performance without flux and rejection decline up to 170 h operation, beyond which slow declines in water flux and rejection were observed due to fouling by NOM and membrane wetting. The overall findings suggest that an interlayer-free mesoporous silica membrane offers excellent performance and high salt rejection (80–99%) for wetland saline water treatments.

The Determination of Pore Shape and Interfacial Barrier of Entry for Light Gases Transport in Amorphous TEOS-Derived Silica: A Finite Element Method

The interfacial barrier of entry for light gas transport in a nanopore was a crucial factor to determine the separation efficiency in membrane technologies. To examine this effect, amorphous silica was prepared by sol-gel process, and its characterization results revealed that the commonly used cylindrical pore shape failed to represent the adsorption behavior of gases, but instead the pore shape had to be represented by a slit pore model. A finite element method (FEM) was developed to analyze the interfacial resistance by integrating a Lennard-Jones (LJ) potential over the layer area. It was found that the strong repulsion/attraction at the pore interface could be paired with the motion energy of guest molecules to predict the ideal selectivity between gases, thereby providing a solution to preliminarily screen the separation performance among a host of membrane candidates.

Performance and long term stability of mesoporous silica membranes for desalination

This work shows the preparation of silica membranes by a two-step sol-gel method using tetraethyl orthosilicate in ethanolic solution by employing nitric acid and ammonia as co-catalysts. The sols prepared in pH 6 resulted in the lowest concentration of silanol (Si–OH) species to improve hydrostability and the optimized conditions for film coating. The membrane was tested to desalinate 0.3–15 wt % synthetic sodium chloride (NaCl) solutions at a feed temperature of 22 °C followed by long term membrane performance of up to 250 h in 3.5 wt % NaCl solution. Results show that the water flux (and salt rejection) decrease with increasing salt concentration delivering an average value of 9.5 kg m^–2 h^–1 (99.6%) and 1.55 kg m^–2 h^–1 (89.2%) from the 0.3 and 15 wt % saline feed solutions, respectively. Furthermore, the permeate salt concentration was measured to be less than 600 ppm for testing conditions up to 5 wt % saline feed solutions, achieving below the recommended standard for potable water. Long term stability shows that the membrane performance in water flux was stable for up to 150 h, and slightly reduced from thereon, possibly due to the blockage of large hydrated ions in the micropore constrictions of the silica matrix. However, the integrity of the silica matrix was not affected by the long term testing as excellent salt rejection of >99% was maintained for over 250 h.