Development of Electrospun Nanofiber Membranes for Oil-Water Separation

Oil-in-water emulsion is encountered in many industries including petroleum, cosmetics, pharmaceutical, agriculture, food, polymer, paper, textile, leather, and metal machining. When the oil-water emulsion is discharged into sanitary sewers or public water ways, it results in environmental problems as well as waste of huge quantities of valuable water and oil resources. Therefore, it is becomes crucial to develop efficient and economical technology for the separation of oil and water from the interest of environmental protection and valuable resource recovery. Being the worlds largest oil producing country, Saudi Arabia is also producing large quantities of emulsified oil-water mixture. Among various technologies developed to separate oil from water, use of membrane technology has been on the forefront. In this research, we propose to develop super hydrophobic electro-spun nanofiber membranes with enhanced characteristics and performance compared to the existing ultrafiltration and microfiltration membranes. The electro-spun nanofiber membranes will be fabricated from polymer solutions and polymer solution-nanoparticles blend. Electrospinning technique will be used to fabricate nanofiber mats from various suitable polymer chemistries. Being one dimensional nano materials, nanofibers have extremely high specific surface area because of their small diameters. Moreover, the nanofiber membranes are highly porous with excellent pore connectivity. These unique characteristics together with functionalities from polymer materials provide nanofibers with many outstanding properties as separation membranes. The fabricated nanofiber mats will be characterized, evaluated and optimized for the best combination of fiber size and morphology to yield membranes with the most efficient and economical oil-water separation characteristics.