High-Performance Ultrafiltration Membrane: Recent Progress and Its Application for Wastewater Treatment

This review presents an overview of high-performance ultrafiltration (UF) membranes, including fouling resistant, micellar-enhanced, tight, adsorptive, and catalytic UF. The review discusses recent advances in the development of these membranes, focusing on their preparation method, performances, and applications. Then, the review concludes with a discussion of the challenges and future outlooks of these UF membranes in wastewater treatment. Recently, the development of UF membranes has resulted in membranes with high performances in wastewater treatment. For instance, fouling-resistant membranes synthesized through surface modification show significant improvement in terms of fouling reduction and flux recovery. In addition, coupling with complexation reaction, tightening membrane pore structure, endowing membrane with adsorption ability, and functionalizing UF membrane with catalytic properties, greatly improve the performance of UF in removing pollutants. Highly selective UF membranes can achieve remarkable various pollutant removals (e.g., organic compounds and heavy metals) from wastewater. UF membrane has been widely applied in wastewater treatment due to its low-pressure operation, relatively low energy consumption, high product quality, and simple operation. Significant efforts have been dedicated to improve UF membrane performance. Fouling resistant and highly selective UF membranes have been developed successfully, which showed remarkable performance in various pollutant removals. These high-performance UF membranes provide the possibility of process simplification in wastewater treatment since they can remove a more wide range of pollutant types, and thus post-treatment step may be reduced.