Premium
Alcohol‐induced change of “reverse osmosis” polyamide membrane surface
Author(s) -
Agrawal Vinod K.,
Singh Puyam S.
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
journal of applied polymer science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.575
H-Index - 166
eISSN - 1097-4628
pISSN - 0021-8995
DOI - 10.1002/app.36561
Subject(s) - polyamide , sorption , membrane , reverse osmosis , chemical engineering , aqueous solution , methanol , chemistry , scanning electron microscope , alcohol , materials science , polymer chemistry , chromatography , organic chemistry , composite material , adsorption , engineering , biochemistry
An analysis method based on Attenuated total reflectance infra‐red spectroscopy was used to measure water and alcohol sorption from water–methanol and water–isopropanol aqueous solutions in the “reverse osmosis” polyamide membrane. Preferential sorption of water over alcohol was observed in the membrane. As alcohol concentration in the solution increases, the sorption selectivity of water over methanol increases from 4 to 375, whereas the sorption selectivity water over isopropanol increases only from 2 to 8. However, as water is nonsolvent for polyamide, the membrane surface structure remains unaffected by the water sorption. On the other hand, the sorption of alcohol in the membrane leads to decrease in characteristic IR band intensities of the polyamide implying a change in membrane surface structure which corroborates with the change in membrane surface roughness as observed by atomic force microscopy (AFM) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci, 2012