Alcohol

Separation (statistics)

Emulsion

Engineering

Polymer chemistry

Metallurgy

Materials science

Chromatography

Biochemistry

Computer science

Membrane technology

Polyvinyl alcohol

Chemical engineering

Geology

Physical chemistry

Organic chemistry

Membrane

Electrocoagulation

Composite material

Plating (geology)

Chemistry

Geophysics

Electrode

Anode

Nickel

Machine learning

Journal of Membrane Science

Efficient separation of oil-in-water emulsion remains a decisive step for success of oily wastewater treatment. To achieve this goal, a novel strategy regarding combining membrane separation with in situ electrocoagulation based on sacrificial anodes and cathodic hydrogen evolution via conductive metalized fabric membrane was proposed. As a key component of this novel coupling system, nickel functionalized fabric membrane with high hydrophilicity and electrical conductivity (electrical resistance of ∼2 Ω cm−1) was successfully prepared via a low-cost and facile route, including steps of PVA (polyvinyl alcohol)/Ni coating and autocatalytic electroless Ni plating. The optimized conductive membranes exhibited high permeate flux (19.3 × 105 L m−2 h−1·bar−1), separation efficiencies (99.5%), and separation stability to separate oil/water mixtures during the gravity-driven filtration process. To achieve the ideal performance to separate oil-in-water emulsion, a coupled electrocoagulation-membrane separation system was constructed with Ni@PVA membrane and Al mesh as the cathode and anode, respectively. It was shown that the coupled electrocoagulation-membrane separation system could achieve 99.4% rejection with high flux of 12.0 × 103 L m−2 h−1·bar−1 for oil/water emulsion separation, under the current density of 8 mA cm−2 and 20 min electrolysis time. This study revealed that the proposed electrocoagulation-membrane separation system based on Ni@PVA membrane is a promising technique in oil/water separation.

Preparation of nickel@polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) conductive membranes to couple a novel electrocoagulation-membrane separation system for efficient oil-water separation