Development of new pervaporation composite membranes for desalination: Membrane characterizations and experimental permeation data

The data contained in this publication refers to a new approach to design composite pervaporation membranes that could be useful in water treatment. The work is based on the rational prediction of the membrane mass transfer coefficient using the resistance in series model and the corresponding experimental membranes were tested with several aqueous solutions comparatively to a commercially available porous distillation membrane (PVDF). All the related data, i.e. permeation water fluxes and conductivity of the permeate, were collected for hours, in the range 3 to 7 h. The strategy was to develop pervaporation membranes by coating a porous PVDF support (122µm) with various dense layers (hydrophobic polymers: Teflon™ AF2400, PMP, PTMSP). The objective was to avoid definitely the wetting problem observed in membrane distillation while keeping approximately the permeance than the porous support. The data reported here are related to the surface property of the membranes (contact angles), to the mechanical resistance of the membranes, to the wetting phenomena observed directly and recorded by observing the variation of water flux through the membranes and to the conductivity of the water condensed at the permeate side.