(575h) Modeling Non-Solvent Induced Phase Separation during Formation

Maryam Omidvarkordshouli, Abbas Ghassemi, Reza Foudazi

Department of Chemical and Material Engineering, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico 88003

Industrial and urban growths are bound heavily on water quality, with potentially harmful follow-up on human health and posing severe social concerns. However, water treatment is expensive and requires heavy financing. To resolve such challenges, various advanced treatment technologies have been proposed, tested and applied to meet both current and anticipated treatment requirements. Among them, membrane filtration has been proven to successfully remove a wide range of challenging contaminants and hold a great promise in water and wastewater treatment. Current membrane technology mainly utilizes non-solvent induced phase inversion (NIPS) to produce porous polymers for ultrafiltration. In NIPS process by introduction of a non-solvent, a polymer solution is transformed into two phases: a solid, polymer-rich phase that forms the matrix of the membrane and a liquid, polymer-poor phase that forms the membrane pores. Important innovations in this process are based either on intrinsic properties of the polymers as the barrier phase, or on the formation of special morphologies by phase separation in this barrier phase. There are several experimental works reported in literature for optimization of NIPS process; however, the phase inversions process has not comprehensively been modeled yet. In this study, we utilize a phase separation model by considering dynamic asymmetry of polymer chains and solvent molecules to predict the morphology during phase separation of polysulfone solution in dimethylformamide through introducing water as non-solvent.