Revealing key structural and operating features on water/salts selectivity of polyamide nanofiltration membranes by ensemble machine learning.

Nanofiltration (NF) plays an increasingly central role in water/salts separation, which puts forward tailored requirements on NF membranes in a variety of application scenarios. However, the ambiguous separation mechanisms of NF including membrane structure parameters and operating conditions hinder the rational design of versatile NF membranes. Herein, machine learning was used to explore the correlation between membrane structure parameters and operating conditions with water/salts selectivity, and reveal the importance of the diverse features based on literature data. Two structural features of polyamide NF membrane (pore radius and zeta potential) and two operating parameters (pressure and feed concentration) were typically extracted and associated with water/salts selectivity. Random Forest and XGBoost models were employed to learn from relevant variables and assess their importance. The results showed that membrane structure parameters attached more importance to water/salts selectivity than that of operating conditions accompanying the variable influence for different typed salts, where symmetrical salts were mainly governed by size sieving while Donnan exclusion for asymmetrical salts. Structure-performance relationships between pore radius, zeta potential and diverse water/salts selectivity were established using partial dependence plot analysis. It is anticipated that the constructed comprehensive insights can be further leveraged to tackle performance modulation and oriented design of multi-scenarios NF membranes. [Display omitted] • Machine learning was used to understand NF separation mechanisms. • Random Forest and XGBoost models were employed to learn from relevant variables and assess features importance. • Symmetrical salts were mainly governed by size sieving while Donnan exclusion for asymmetrical salts. • The integrated management of pore size and zeta potential for the oriented design of versatile NF membranes was highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]