Higher Acid Recovery Efficiency of Novel Functionalized Inorganic/Organic Composite Anion Exchange Membranes from Acidic Wastewater.

In this work, the synthesis of a series of the functionalized inorganic/organic composite anion exchange membranes (AEMs) was carried out by employing the varying amount of inorganic filler consist of -(trimethoxysilylpropyl)-,,-trimethylammonium chloride (TMSP-TMACl) into the quaternized poly (2, 6-dimethyl-1, 4-phenylene oxide) (QPPO) matrix for acid recovery via diffusion dialysis (DD) process. Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy clearly demonstrated the fabrication of the functionalized inorganic/organic composite AEMs and the subsequent membrane characteristic measurements such as ion exchange capacity (IEC), linear swelling ratio (LSR), and water uptake (W) gave us the optimum loading condition of the filler without undesirable filler particle aggregation. These composite AEMs exhibited IEC of 2.18 to 2.29 meq/g, LSR of 13.33 to 18.52%, and W of 46.11 to 81.66% with sufficient thermal, chemical, and mechanical stability. The diffusion dialysis (DD) test for acid recovery from artificial acid wastewater of HCl/FeCl showed high acid DD coefficient (U) (0.022 to 0.025 m/h) and high separation factor (S) (139-260) compared with the commercial membrane. Furthermore, the developed AEMs was acceptably stable (weight loss < 20%) in the acid wastewater at 60 °C as an accelerated severe condition for 2 weeks. These results clearly indicated that the developed AEMs have sufficient potential for acid recovery application by DD process.