title: Novel reverse osmosis membranes composed of modified PVA/Gum Arabic conjugates: Biofouling mitigation and chlorine resistance enhancement.
abstract: A novel crosslinked Poly (vinyl alcohol) (PVA) reverse osmosis (RO) thin film membrane conjugated with Gum Arabic (GA) with superb performance and features was synthesized for water desalination. RO membrane desalination parameters, such as hydrophilicity, surface roughness, water permeability, salt rejection, Chlorine resistance and biofouling resistance were evaluated using a dead end RO filtration unit. The incorporation of Pluronic F127 and the conjugation of Gum Arabic improved the overall RO performance of the membranes. This study has shown that the membrane PVA-GA-5 that contains 0.9wt% Gum Arabic provided excellent permeation, salt rejection, Chlorine and biofouling resistance and mechanical strength. The most remarkable result to arise from this research is that the overall RO performance enhancement has been achieved while utilizing PVA/Gum Arabic as a separation layer without the use of a substrate, which eliminates negative effects associated with the use of a substrate like internal concentration polarization.
authors.affiliation: School of Materials Science and Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA; Department of Mechanical Engineering, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals, Dhahran 31261, Saudi Arabia. Electronic address: wfallata@gatech.edu.
authors.forename: Wail
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Falath
authors.affiliation: School of Materials Science and Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA; Department of Polymer Engineering and Technology, University of the Punjab, Lahore, 54590 Pakistan.
authors.forename: Aneela
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Sabir
authors.affiliation: School of Materials Science and Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA; G.W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA. Electronic address: karl.jacob@mse.gatech.edu.
authors.forename: Karl I
authors.initials: KI
authors.lastname: Jacob
keywords: Biofouling; Chlorine resistance; DGEBA (PubChem CID: 2286); Dimethyl Sulfoxide (PubChem CID: 679); Gum Arabic; Gum Arabic (PubChem CID: 24847856); Pluronic F-127 (PubChem CID: 24751); Pluronic F127; Poly (vinyl alcohol); Polyvinyl alcohol (PubChem CID: 11199); Reverse osmosis membrane