Filtration Membranes Fabricated by Photochemically Modified Graphene Oxide Towards Water Treatment

Abstract

Graphene oxide a two-dimensional nanomaterial is promising in a range of proposed applications such as light-emitting electronics photocatalysis nanomedicine environmental remediation to name a few Increasingly graphene-based nanomaterials are used to fabricate high-performance filtration membranes that can remove pollutants from water for a range of water treatment purposes These recent studies have mostly used as-prepared GO to create water filtration membranes with limited work involving structurally modified GO materials While these modification processes are effective they could leave greater ecological footprints as a result of the wastes discharged and energy consumption This research was to present a greener method that uses solar energy without any chemical addition to tune the properties of GO that is used to fabricate high-performance water filtration membranes It was found that the photochemical modification GO membrane exhibit enhanced pollutant rejection and permeate fluxes (80 ± 0 3 LMH/bar) roughly 2 times higher than pristine GO membranes in pH = 8 And the filtration performance of photochemical modification GO membrane was stable than pristine GO membranes with pH chance In addition to photochemical modification GO membranes exhibited a greater NOM removal compared to GO membranes and commercially available UF membranes This provides a new modification method of the GO membrane for enhancing the filtration performance

Date of Award	2016 Sept 2
Original language	English
Supervisor	Wen-Che Hou (Supervisor)