Alkali Attack on Anion Exchange Membranes with PVC Backing and Binder: II Prediction of Electrical and Mechanical Performances from Simple Optical Analyses

Performance of anion exchange membranes (AEMs), including polyvinyl chloride (PVC) as backing and binder, decreases during a repetitive cleaning-in-place (CIP) treatment using alkali. In this study, we have systematically performed two optical analyses, relative total visible (VIS) reflectance and handheld X-ray fluorescence (XRF), for alkali-attacked commercially available AEM (Neosepta(®) AMX, Tokyo, Japan) with different NaOH immersion conditions (0–1.0 M NaOH at 40–80 °C for 0–168 h). The VIS reflectance and XRF data were then compared with the electrical and mechanical performances (i.e., membrane resistance, proton rejection, amount of fixed-charge sites, and Young’s modulus) of the alkali-attacked AMXs. The result indicated that there are clear linear relationships between their performances and both VIS reflectance and XRF data especially at 40 °C, indicating both optical analyses have a good possibility as a quick diagnosis-in-place (DIP) to predict the resulting performance of the alkali-attacked AMXs. In addition, we also found a clear linear relationship between VIS reflectance and XRF data, so that polyene formations through dehydrochlorination of PVC during alkali attack is one of dominant mechanisms for the performance reduction of the alkali-attacked AMX at 40 °C. These results are promising to be useful for the analysis of ion exchange membranes (IEMs) used in real commercial processes on-site in future.