Abstract
A method to measure the static adsorption on membrane surfaces has been developed and described. The static adsorption of an amylase-F has been measured on two different ultrafiltration membranes, both with a cut-off value of 10 kDa (a PES membrane and the ETNA10PP membrane, which is a surface-modified PVDF membrane). The adsorption follows the Langmuir adsorption theory. Thus, the static adsorption consists of monolayer coverage. The static adsorption is expressed both as a permeability drop and an adsorption resistance. From the adsorption isotherms the maximum static permeability drops and the maximum static adsorption resistances are determined. The maximum static permeability drop for the hydrophobic PES membrane is 75 % and the maximum static adsorption resistance is 0.014 m2hbar/L. The maximum static permeability drop for the hydrophilic surface-modified PVDF membrane (ETNA10PP) is 23 % and the maximum static adsorption resistance is 0.0046 m2hbar/L. The difference in maximum static adsorption, by a factor of around 3, affects the performance during filtration of a 5 g/l amylase-F solution at 2 bar. The two membranes behave very similar during filtration with almost equal fluxes and retentions even though the initial water permeability of the PES membrane is around 3 times larger than the initial water permeability of the ETNA10PP membrane. This is attributed mainly to the larger maximum static adsorption of the PES membrane. The permeability drop during filtration exceeds the maximum static permeability drop, indicating that the build-up layer on the membranes during filtration exceeds monolayer coverage, which is also seen by the increase in fouling resistance during filtration. The accumulated layer on the membrane surface can be described as a continually increasing cake-layer thickness, which is independent of the membrane type. At higher concentrations of enzyme, concentration polarization effects can not be neglected. Therefore stagnant film theory and the osmotic pressure model can describe the dependency between flux and bulk concentration.
Original language | English |
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Journal | Langmuir |
Volume | 23 |
Issue number | 18 |
Pages (from-to) | 9341-9351 |
ISSN | 0743-7463 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2007 |
Keywords
- monolayer
- Langmuir isotherm
- amylase
- Adsorption
- ultrafiltration membranes