Impact of Particle Shape and Surface Group on Membrane Fouling

Membrane fouling remains one of the most critical drawbacks in membrane filtration processes. Although the effect of various operating parameters—such as flow velocity, concentration, and foulant size—are well-studied, the impact of particle shape is not well understood. To bridge this gap, this study investigated the effect of polystyrene particle sphericity (sphere, peanut and pear) on external membrane fouling, along with the effect of particle charge (unmodified, carboxylated, and aminated). The results indicate that the non-spherical particles produce higher critical fluxes than the spherical particles (i.e., respectively 24% and 13% higher for peanut and pear), which is caused by the looser packing in the cake due to the varied particle orientations. Although higher crossflow velocities diminished the differences in the critical flux values among the particles of different surface charges, the differences among the particle shapes remained distinct. In dead-end filtration, non-spherical particles also produced lower flux declines. The shear-induced diffusion model predicts all five particle types well. The Derjaguin-Landau-Verwey-Overbeek (DLVO) and extended DLVO (XDLVO) models were used to quantify the interaction energies, and the latter agreed with the relative critical flux trends of all of the PS particles. As for the flux decline trends, both the DLVO and XDLVO results are in good agreement.