Supported Graphene Oxide Hollow Fibre Membrane for Oily Wastewater Treatment

Oil and gas industry deals with a large amount of undesirable discharges of liquid, solid, and gaseous wastes and the amounts can considerably change during the production phases. Oilfield wastewater or produced water is known to constitute various organic and inorganic components. Discharging the produced water can pollute surface and underground water and therefore the necessity to treat this oily wastewater is an inevitable challenge. The current technologies for the treatment of this metastable oil-in-water are not really effective and very pricey. As a result, there is a great interest from many parties around the world in finding cost-effective technologies. In recent years, membrane processes have been utilized for oily wastewater treatment. In these work, a graphene oxide membrane supported on a highly porous Al2O3 hollow fibre was prepared using vacuum assisted technique and its performance in treating oily wastewater was investigated. Graphene oxide (GO) was prepared using a modified Hununer's method and further characterized using XRD, TGA and SEM. The results showed that the GO was successfully synthesized. The GO membrane was deposited on alumina hollow fibre substrates. The membrane performance was then investigated using dead-end filtration setup with synthetic oily wastewater as a feed. The effects of operating times on rejection rate and permeate flux were investigated. The experimental results showed that the oil rejections were over 90%. It was concluded that the supported GO membrane developed in this study may be considered feasible in treating oily wastewater. Detail study on the effects of transmembrane pressure, oil concentration, pH. and fouling should be carried out in the future