Application of Nanofibres in Water Treatment

Abstract

Water scarcity is one of the major problems facing the world today. Although 70% of the surface of earth is covered by water, the percentage of population which have access to sufficient safe drinking water is very limited. The available water resources are also become unsuitable for usages due to mingling different types of contaminants in to the water bodies via release of industrial and domestic wastes. Currently, there is worldwide concern on proper treatment of wastewater prior to release them in to water bodies. Recently much attention has been focused on novel technologies such as nanotechnology which can be applied to invent new methods for water treatment. Among different types of water treatment methods, membrane filtration is a new method, which uses a semi-permeable membrane for filtration. These methods have some advantages over other methods such as free from chemicals, high scalability, low operational temperature, low power consumption, etc. Among them nanofiltration is one of the application of nanotechnology for improvement of the membrane filtration method. Electrospinning is the widely applied technique for fabrication of nanofiltration membranes. It is a cost effective, versatile technique which leads to fabricate membranes with superior qualities. Nanofilter membranes have been fabricated using polymers, nanotubes, graphene oxide, etc. Thin-?lm composite (TFC) membranes are fabricated combining different organic and inorganic compounds. Other than that, the conventional ceramic metal oxide as well as mixed matrix materials (MMMs) are used to produce nanofibrous membranes. Although many of these fabricated nanomaterials show superior qualities making them suitable candidates to apply to produce nanofilter membranes, they all are associated with drawbacks which prevent them from applying for commercial productions. Therefore, the future challenge is application of novel techniques and materials in order to overcome the drawbacks of these membranes and fabrication of perfect nanomaterial for water treatment.