Designing Advanced Membrane Materials for Produced Water Treatment

Rebecca Erwin*, Km Prottoy Shariar Piash, and Oishi Sanyal

Benjamin M. Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506

Presentation Category: Physical Sciences & Engineering (Poster Presentation #159)

Student’s Major: Chemical Engineering

This research aims to develop a membrane separation process for hypersaline produced wastewater. Treatment of such streams by conventional wastewater treatment processes is challenging; membranes could play an important role to address this issue. Membrane separation is significantly more energy efficient than thermally driven separation processes; however, further development of membrane technology is necessary to compete with the efficiency of commercial processes for difficult separation problems, such as hypersaline wastewater. Forward osmosis (FO) is one of the preferred tools for hypersaline water desalination since reverse osmosis fails to perform at such high salinity levels. However, the development of new membrane materials is necessary for this FO process. Thus, this work aims to develop membranes for forward osmosis (FO) membrane separation by means of dip-coating. Through the process of dip-coating, oppositely charged polymers are layered, treated with an acidic solution, and rinsed with DI water to develop a porous membrane. The performance of dip-coated membranes is compared with commercial membranes under forward osmosis separation. This undergraduate was funded by the National Science Foundation EBSCOR project “Improving Water Management, Treatment, and Recovery in Oil and Gas Production”.

Funding: NSF EPSCOR

Program/mechanism supporting research/creative efforts: an external internship or other type of program