Advanced Block Copolymer Membranes for Oily Industrial Wastewater Treatment

Abstract

Tremendous amounts of oily wastewater are produced daily from industrial processes, including petrochemical, textile, leather, and steel processing. This wastewater is a huge challenge to the environment and industry uses multiple approaches to separate the water from oil including oil-absorbing materials, gravity separation, flocculation, and coagulation. However, these concepts are ineffective in separating oily water emulsions where the oil droplets are smaller than 20 µm in size and do not perform well upon incorporating chemicals or using an electric field. Membrane filtration is one of the best strategies to handle such emulsions, especially the surfactant-stabilized ones, as they yield highly pure water permeate via simple filtration process and they can be cleaned re-used for multiple times at large-industrial scales. This presentation will give an overview of novel polystyrene-based copolymer membranes developed and tested at Qatar University in collaboration with the University of Southern Mississippi. The newly developed membranes display substantial enhancement in separating oil from water in tight emulsions while demonstrating remarkably high resistance to fouling over five runs in comparison to the commercial membranes that get fouled within only two emulsion runs. The presentation will outline the membranes' oil rejection efficiency, chemical, morphological, and mechanical stability after cycles of cleaning and reuse. Finally, the membranes were tested using synthetic oily water and real-field samples and testing protocols from the oil & gas companies in Qatar.