Synthesis and Application of Graphene Oxide@ZIF-8/Alumina Hollow Fibre Membrane for Oily Wastewater Treatment

Faezrul Zackry, Abdul Halim (2025) Synthesis and Application of Graphene Oxide@ZIF-8/Alumina Hollow Fibre Membrane for Oily Wastewater Treatment. Masters thesis, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, (UNIMAS).

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Abstract

Oily wastewater pollution primarily harms drinking water and groundwater resources, endangers marine life and threatens human health. Therefore, the use of membrane filtration technology for water reclamation from oily wastewater is one of the effective ways for the removal of oil from industrial wastewater. Hence a promising approach is by microfiltration using membrane-based graphene oxide (GO). The pristine alumina hollow fibre membrane is modified with a graphene oxide (GO) sheet which was inserted with Zeolitic Imidazolate Framework-8 (ZIF-8) crystals to form a stable nanocomposite membrane with a high surface area and rich with oxygen functional groups. This significantly improved the adsorption capacity because it provides more site for oil adsorption. Therefore, this research aims to synthesize the graphene oxide (GO) and to fabricate the GO@ZIF-8 nanocomposites onto the alumina hollow fibre membrane (Al2O3) to produced hybrid graphene oxide@ZIF-8/alumina hollow fibre membrane (GO@ZIF-8/Al2O3). In brief, GO is prepared by the oxidation of graphite using KMnO4 as a strong oxidizing agent based on the modified Hummers’ method, then followed by the fabrication of crosslinked GO@ZIF-8 composites on the alumina hollow fibre membrane via in-situ solvothermal assembly method. The GO@ZIF-8/Al2O3 composites structure is explored by Fourier-Transform Infrared Spectrophotometer (FTIR), Ultraviolet–visible spectroscopy (UV-Vis), Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope (FE-SEM) and X-Ray Diffraction (XRD). Successively, the removal of oil from water by GO@ZIF-8/Al2O3 membrane performance was evaluated through the batch adsorption study and crossflow filtration system. The effects of several adsorption factors, such as initial oil concentration and response time, were investigated. To determine the adsorption mechanism, different kinetic models including Pseudo-First Order and Pseudo-Second Order and isotherms models such as Freundlich and Langmuir were used. Adsorption isotherm is best suited by the Freundlich model (R2=0.98046), whereas adsorption kinetics is best fit by the pseudo-second order (R2=0.98247), indicating that the adsorption process involves chemisorption. According to the crossflow filtration study, the membranes could remove up to 96.32% of the oil from the aqueous solution. Additionally, the reusability analysis revealed that 90.08% of the oil was rejected after 6 reusability cycles. The better separation performance could be attributed to the well dispersion of ZIF-8 nanoparticles in the GO onto the alumina hollow fibre support membrane. Hence, a straightforward scalable approach for producing reliable GO@ZIF-8 based membranes with an efficient oil removal capability is shown.

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