Facilitated Transport for Water Treatment through a CA-based Polymer Inclusion Membrane: Synthesis & Optimization

The state-of-the-art polymer inclusion membranes (PIMs) have risen attentions for their desirable stability and flux for ion separation. PIM ingredients are crown ether as a carrier, ionic liquid as a plasticizer, CA as a base polymer, and, in this work, MOF. Various amounts of constituting components will affect the resulted membrane performance in terms of flux. In this regard, the ingredients contents are required to be optimized. To do so, a well-suited design of the experiment is capable of estimating the optimal composition of the prepared PIM. In the current study, response surface methodology was used to optimize flux using the optimum amounts of the ingredients of the final membrane. Using this technique, the effects of the main ingredients and their interactions were investigated. In this work, attempts have been made to evaluate the flux using response surface methodology. Being a strong and widespread RSM approach, a central composite design (CCD) was used to do so. To study the MOFs structures, XRD analysis was used. FTIR analysis was exploited to investigate the membrane structure.