Synthesis of nanostructured titanium dioxide layer onto kaolin hollow fibre membrane via hydrothermal method for decolourisation of reactive black 5.

Hydrothermal method has been proven to be an effective method to synthesise the nanostructured titanium dioxide (TiO) with good morphology and uniform distribution at low temperature. Despite of employing a well-known and commonly used glass substrate as the support to hydrothermally synthesise the nanostructured TiO, this study emphasised on the application of kaolin hollow fibre membrane as the support for the fabrication of kaolin/TiO nanorods (TNR) membrane. By varying the hydrothermal reaction times (2 h, 6 h, and 10 h), the different morphology, distribution, and properties of TiO nanorods on kaolin support were observed by field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM), energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX), atomic force microscope (AFM), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR).

Investigation on the effect of sintering temperature on kaolin hollow fibre membrane for dye filtration.

Despite its extraordinary price, ceramic membrane can still be able to surpass polymeric membrane in the applications that require high temperature and pressure conditions, as well as harsh chemical environment. In order to alleviate the high cost of ceramic material that still becomes one of the major factors that contributes to the high production cost of ceramic membrane, various attempts have been made to use low cost ceramic materials as alternatives to well-known expensive ceramic materials such as alumina, silica, and zirconia in the fabrication of ceramic membrane. Thus, local Malaysian kaolin has been chosen as the ceramic material in this study for the preparation of kaolin hollow fibre membrane since it is inexpensive and naturally abundant in Malaysia.