Dipartimento di Fisica - Tesi di Dottorato
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://lisa.unical.it/handle/10955/35
Questa collezione raccoglie le Tesi di Dottorato afferenti al Dipartimento di Fisica dell'Università della Calabria.
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Item Innovative hybrid-composite membranes based on 2D materials for desalination of saline waters(Università della Calabria, 2023-01-20) Frappa, Mirko; Cipparrone, Gabriella; Gugliuzza, Annarosa; Drioli, EnricoWater is essential for the life of all living organisms and its conservation and responsible use is one of the global challenges that humanity will have to face in the near future. The recovery of water and salts from the sea represents the main source and today represents an important opportunity within the logic of sustainable water management. Water reuse is the use of treated wastewater for beneficial purposes, which increases a community's available water supply and makes it more reliable, especially in times of drought. Access to clean water resources, however, requires urgent economic and ecological needs on a global level, urging more efficient technologies. Indeed, due to its energy consumption, seawater desalination is generally an expensive process. Currently, technological progress has led to the development of a series of technologies that make the wastewater treatment process increasingly concrete and efficient. Among them, membrane processes represent a valid alternative thanks to the numerous advantages offered such as low environmental impact, high efficiency and sufficient related costs. Research, respecting the environment, is increasingly focused on improving these techniques in terms of production and costs. In this sense, two eco-sustainable techniques have been developed based on the use of porous and hydrophobic membranes: membrane distillation (MD) and membrane crystallization (MCr). These two technologies do not yet have the production capacity to replace reverse osmosis, which is currently the leading process for desalination. However, integrating these processes with RO could increase the recovery factor close to one hundred percent. In fact, in addition to increasing the production of clean water, it is also possible to recover the salts dissolved in sea water thanks to the MCr process. Hence the basic idea of this work where we wanted to introduce several innovative materials in membrane systems with the aim of improving and optimizing the MD / MCr processes. In this case, three classes of materials have been taken into consideration for the preparation of the polymeric membranes. The first material is Graphene consisting of a monatomic layer of carbon atoms. The second type of material proposed is part of the family of transition metals and are Monolayer dicalcogenides. Among the dicalcogenides, Bismuth Tellurium and metal organic frameworks (MOF) have been taken in consideration. Graphene and dicalcogenated metals have been exfoliated by the WET-Jet Milling technique and supplied by BeDimensional S.P.A. while the Zirconium based MOF [MIL-140B] has been provided by Nanjing Tech University (China). The materials have been used for the preparation of PVDF-based membranes, characterized and tested in MD and MCr in order to evaluate the correlated effects on productivity and selectivity.