Novel carbon templated silica membrane prepared from Nypa fruticans leaf for seawater desalination.

Inorganic material applied for membrane technology such as silica is well employed for water desalination nowadays. Silica membrane is favorable to use to offer high selectivity and robust materials. However, it also has a debility due to unstable matrices when contact to water. Nypa fruticans leaf was fundamentally containing carbon which is potential as templating agent to enhanced the hydro-stability. The objective of this work is to investigate performance of nypa-silica membrane for desalination of seawater. Nypa-silica membrane prepared by mixing silica sol and carbon from nypa (0.1, 0.5 and 2.5 %) for 90 min at cold temperature. Then membrane support was immersed into nypa-silica sol by dipcoater and calcined at 350 and 450°C under inert atmosphere condition via rapid thermal processing (RTP) technique. Silica-nypa membranes were tested by seawater desalination (3.5 wt% NaCl) by pervaporation. Carbon from nypa gave a good impact to silica base membrane performance depends on template loading. Increasing concentration of nypa may reduce water flux of permeate. The result of membrane in this work rather low water flux. However, all of membranes show great salt rejection >99.9%. Interestingly, the permeate salt concentration of all silica-nypa membranes performed less than 600 ppm of limited total dissolved salt on drinking water according to standards given by the World Health Organization (WHO). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]