Fabrication of Hierarchically Structured Honeycomb PES/Hyflon AD Membranes and Potential Use In Water Desalination

Honeycomb membranes may represent a great innovation in the field of the membrane contactors, especially in water desalination processes. The typical topography of these membranes provides high-definition pore structure through 3D volumetric space, thus leading to a uniform and highly distributed interfacial area. Despite easy to handle, the breath figure technique could have, however, some limitations to the commercially producing large-scale ordered porous films, due to frequent uncontrolled droplets dynamics at the boundary regions. Herein, we explore an approach to get droplets in extensively and hierarchically ordered honeycomb geometries through well-identified interfacial forces. Effects on morphological, wetting, mechanical and transport properties are examined, while a special focus is dedicated to the fabrication of composite PES/Hyflon AD membranes and related process in thermally driven membrane desalination (MD) and membrane crystallization (MC) operations. The membranes performance is examined and discussed in comparison with the commercial ones.