Antibakteriyel özellik kazandırılmış ters osmoz membranların üretimi ve karakterizasyonu

Day by day, clean and potable water resources are polluted and being unavailabe. As a result, the needs of existing freshwater resources are becoming unable to provide around the world. In the current situation, desalination can be solution for the water scarcity. Because seawater and saline aquifers constitute 97.5% of the all water resources on Earth, utilizing an even small amount of this resource could have a great impact on water scarcity. To increase the fresh water supply via desalination of seawater and saline aquifers is the overarching goal for the future of desalination. Desalination plants are operated in more than 120 countries around the world. To get effective results from desalination plants, there are some issues, which have to be solved. One of them, and most important is a biofouling, which effects the performance of reverse osmosis (RO) essentialy. Biofouling causes some problems, such as shorter membrane life and it requires higher operating pressure and more frequent chemical cleaning. Development of antifouling RO membranes is an essential requirement for water treatment in the future. The main objective of this study is to investigate the preparation of an antibacterical surface membrane layer with the additive Bismuth dimercaptopropanol (BisBAL), which is claimed to inhibit biofouling, and the examination of the membrane's characteristics and performance for desalination. The study includes preparation of the support layer to establish selecting of a suitable support layer for active layer. Furthermore it includes the preparation of an active layer with and without the additive BisBAL. Experiments to be carried out together with the membrane characterization and antibacterial properties achieved important results in terms of membranes fabrication at low biofouling characteristics. Antibacterial properties of the membranes were studied using with BL21 strain of E. coli, which was taken from Molecular Biology-Biotechnology & Genetics Research Center (MOBGAM) at ITU. Comprehensive anti bacterial tests with E. Coli showed that BisBAL can be used effectively at RO membrane surface.