How to understand the effect of relative humidity on the morphology and performance of polypiperazine-amide NF membrane during heat curing process

Recent studies have shown that the temperature and time of the heat curing process have important effects on the nanofiltration (NF) membrane structure and properties. However, the mechanism of the relative humidity (RH), as one of the important factors in the heat curing of NF membranes, is still unclear. To analyze the specific effect of RH, we compared the heat curing results of the NF polyamide (PA) membranes fabricated with different monomer concentrations at various RH. The nanofiltration performance of the membranes appeared to be non-uniform when the RH was in the range of 40 %–60 %. Within the appropriate RH range, the rejection of Na2SO4 was preserved at about 98.5 % for the manufactured NF membranes. At high concentrations, the increasing RH created a discontinuous condensate layer on the PA layer surface, which affected the morphology and physicochemical properties of the NF membrane causing a doubling of pure water permeability (PWP) to 8.33 L m−2 h−1·bar−1. At low concentrations, the PA layer was not significantly changed with the increase of RH, but the evaporation of water from the smaller capillary pores in its PES substrate was slowed down, which reduced the capillary stress on the substrate and prevented the collapse of the substrate pore size, resulting in a nearly 20 times increase in its PWP to 39.7 L m−2 h−1·bar−1. This work reveals the effect of RH during heat curing and gives significant guidance to the design and synthesis of high-performance NF membranes.