The application of polyethylenimine grafting reverse osmosis membrane in treating boron‐containing low‐level radioactive wastewaters

BACKGROUND Reverse osmosis (RO), which is widely utilized in wastewater treatment, has been proven to be an effective tool for ion separation with high salts rejection. However, owing to the extremely low concentration of nuclides in boron‐containing low‐level radioactive wastewaters (LRWs), there i...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of chemical technology and biotechnology (1986) 2020-04, Vol.95 (4), p.1085-1092
Main Authors: Chen, Boxian, Chen, Ding, Zhao, Xuan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Boron
Cesium
Cobalt
Contact angle
Decontamination
Grafting
Hydrophilicity
membrane modification
Membranes
Morphology
Nuclides
pH effects
Polyamide resins
Polyethyleneimine
radioactive nuclides
Radioactive wastewaters
Rejection
Reverse osmosis
Salts
Surface charge
Wastewater treatment
Zeta potential
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:BACKGROUND Reverse osmosis (RO), which is widely utilized in wastewater treatment, has been proven to be an effective tool for ion separation with high salts rejection. However, owing to the extremely low concentration of nuclides in boron‐containing low‐level radioactive wastewaters (LRWs), there is a significant reduction in rejection of nuclides by using commercial RO membranes. In this study, in order to obtain higher nuclides rejection under trace‐level condition, novel polyamide RO membranes were fabricated by grafting polyethylenimine (PEI) with different molecular weights on commercial RO membrane surfaces. RESULTS The properties of PEI‐modified membranes were analyzed, such as surface charge, morphology and hydrophilicity. The results showed that zeta potential at pH 7 increased from −22.89 mV to 20.19 mV, which indicated that surface charge altered from negative to positive. Meanwhile, hydrophilicity of membranes was improved since the contact angle decreased from 65° to 36°. The decontamination factor (DF) of cesium(I) increased from 11.69 to 114.23 and the DF of cobalt(II) increased from 28.62 to 3306.88. CONCLUSION The laboratory‐scale experiments with cross‐flow demonstrated the effective rejection of nuclides without obvious membrane flux loss of PEI‐modified membranes. In addition, PEI‐modified membranes offered a stable nuclides removal under high‐level background boron and various pH conditions, which demonstrated a possible application in boron‐containing LRW treatment. © 2019 Society of Chemical Industry
ISSN:0268-2575
1097-4660
DOI:10.1002/jctb.6291