Antifouling and self-cleaning photocatalytic membranes in oily wastewater treatment

This book chapter highlighted the preparation of mesoporous alumina membrane deposited with photocatalyst for the separation of highly concentrated oil emulsion. The catalyst (CuO-CeO) was successfully deposited onto the mesoporous alumina membrane using the sol–gel Pechini method. The obtained membranes were characterized using field emission scanning electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction (XRD), and Brunauer–Emmett–Teller. Three different methods of cleaning process were used to investigate the mesoporous alumina membrane performance in separating highly concentrated oil emulsion, namely ultraviolet (UV)-assisted cleaning, on-off UV-assisted cleaning and water spray cleaning. The results obtained showed that the catalyst dispersed uniformly onto the mesoporous alumina membrane. The membrane with a calcination temperature of 500ºC had 91% oil emulsion rejection with 30.17L/m2⸱h of solute flux under UV irradiation after a 3-hour filtration process.