Scaling electrospray based additive manufacturing of polyamide membranes

Abstract

Additive manufacturing based on electrospray printing has been demonstrated to fabricate polyamide membranes with separation properties similar to commercial membranes while also offering exceptional control of membrane thickness and roughness. In this work, we report on the scalability of the electrospray process to produce membrane leaves that are 10 times the area of membranes fabricated in literature through electrospray printing. The large membrane leaves exhibited salt rejection of >90% (at 2000 ppm feed salt concentration) and ∼0.7 LMH/bar flux, which is comparable to smaller printed membranes using the same process.

Keywords

• Electrospray printing
• Additive manufacturing
• Polyamide membranes
• Scale up