The Principle of Nanofiltration Membrane in Water Treatment
What is nanofiltration? The burst of filtration and filtration-related activity that followed the development of the phase-inversion process for the manufacture of polymeric membranes, in the early 1960s, led to the establishment of three membrane separation processes: reverse osmosis, ultrafiltration and, more recently, microfiltration. These processes took the separation spectrum from the traditional cut point limit of standard filtration of around 0.01 mm (10 μm) to the very finest distinct solids, a few nanometres in size, and enabled the separation of large molecules from solution. The actual size ranges vary somewhat from source to source, but there is general agreement that microfiltration covers the range 10 μm down to 0.1 μm, while ultrafiltration covered 0.1 μm down to 0.005 μm (5 nm) in terms of discrete particles or Molecular Weight Cut-Off (MWCO) figures of 300,000 down to around 300 Daltons for dissolved materials. Reverse osmosis, of course, was designed to retain the