Fabrication of Fouling Resistant Ti3C2Tx(MXene) Cellulose Acetate Nanocomposite Membrane for Forward Osmosis Application

Abstract

Forward Osmosis (FO) is one of the promising technologies that can be used to combat growing water scarcity. However, FO membrane fouling hinders the widespread application of this technology by significantly reducing the water flux and membrane lifecycle. Although forward osmosis has shown lower membrane fouling when compared to other membrane technologies, forward osmosis membrane resistance to fouling must still be improved. In this study, Ti3C2Tx (MXene) was used to improve the fouling resistance of FO flat-thin film membranes. The mixed-matrix Ti3C2Tx (MXene)/ cellulose acetate (CA) membranes with different (wt%) loading of MXene were fabricated by covalent crosslinking followed by phase inversion method. The fabricated membranes were characterized by X-ray powder diffraction (XRD), energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS), contact angle measurement and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The performance of the fabricated FO membranes was evaluated utilizing seawater as draw solution (DS) and two feed solutions (FS) namely; distilled water (DI) and treated sewage effluent (TSE). The water flux, reverse solute flux and the rejection of dissolved solids were evaluated in the FO process. It was observed that the cross-linked cellulose acetate membrane with 8 wt% MXene (CCAM-8%) showed higher resistance to fouling when compared with commercial thin-filmcomposite (TFC) FO membrane, the water flux of CCAM-8% decreased by only 10.7% using TSE as FS compared to DI, where the water flux of the TFC commercial membrane decreased by 32.2% when using TSE as FS compared to DI.