Nowadays, fluoride contamination of drinking water is a major problem for various countries, because high concentrations of fluoride pose a risk of dental and skeletal fluorosis. Over past years, membrane nanofiltration (NF) has been proposed as convenient defluoridation technology. However, NF cannot be applied to water systems with high fluoride concentration, and the disposal of the membrane concentrate remains an issue. In this work, we compared a commercial polyester NF membrane and a polypropylene hollow-fiber membrane distillation (MD) module for their ability to remove fluoride ions from water in the presence of hardness ions and organic fouling agents. The NF membrane can offer more than 10 times higher water productivity than MD, under realistic gradients of temperature and pressure, respectively. Despite that, after reaching a concentration factor of about 3, fouling and scaling caused the flux to drop to about 80% with respect to its initial value. Moreover, F^– retention decreased from 90% to below 80%, thus providing a permeate of scarce quality. MD was operated in the direct-contact mode on a polypropylene hollow-fiber membrane, which was charged with a hot feed flow (average T = 58 °C) on one side and a cooled (20 °C) permeate flow of distilled water on the other side. The concentration of fluoride ions in the permeate was always below the detection limit of our electrode (0.2 ppm), regardless of the fluoride concentration in the feed. Moreover, the MD module showed higher resistance to fouling and scaling than NF, and CaF₂ crystals were recovered from the MD concentrate after cooling. These results suggest that the synergic combination of the two techniques might be beneficial for the purification of fluoride-contaminated water systems: MD can be used to further concentrate the NF retentate, thus producing high-purity water and recovering CaF₂ crystals.

Natural water bodies and treated wastewaters contain an increasing variety of organic micropollutants with a negative impact on ecosystems and human health. Herein, we propose an integrated process based on membrane distillation and advanced oxidation, in which thermal energy is simultaneously used to drive the permeation of pure water through a hydrophobic membrane and to activate the generation of reactive oxygen species by a thermocatalytic perovskite, namely Ce-doped strontium ferrate. At a feed temperature of 65 °C, our thermocatalytic distillation apparatus can effectively retain and degrade bisphenol A, as model pollutant, while producing distilled water at the constant rate of 1.60 ± 0.03 L h⁻¹ m⁻², over four continuous runs. Moreover, the membrane makes degradation faster by concentrating the pollutant during filtration. Our technology is effective in the production of pure water without creating a toxic concentrate, it relies on simple process design, and it does not require high pressure or additional chemicals. In addition, it can potentially work continuously driven by renewable thermal energies or waste heat.

Surfactant-templated 5 mol% Al₂O₃-doped silica membranes nanofiltration membranes were synthesized via the sol-gel method, and afterward, were optimized, and tested with respect to the permeability and rejection rate. The disordered silica network was stabilized by doping 5 mol% alumina. Tetraethyl orthosilicate and aluminum isopropoxide were used as the silica and alumina precursors, respectively. Cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) was used not only as a pore-forming agent, but also to control the reaction rate of the aluminum isopropoxide, thus obtaining highly homogeneous materials. The results about filtration of model solutions showed that the optimized membranes are featured by both a relatively high water permeability (1.1–2.3 L·m⁻²·h⁻¹ ·bar⁻¹) and a high rejection for salts (74% for NaCl, and >95% for MgSO₄ and Na₂SO₄) and organic pollutants (e.g., about 98% for caffeine). High rejection of divalent ions and organic molecules was also observed when a real wastewater effluent was filtered. The influence of the synthesis conditions on the membrane performance is discussed.

Due to progressive limitation of access to clean drinkable water, it is nowadays a priority to find an effective method of water purification from those emerging organic contaminants, which might have potentially harmful and irreversible effects on living organisms and environment. This manuscript reports the development of a new strategy for water purification, which combines a novel and recently developed Al₂O₃-doped silica nanofiltration membrane with a thermocatalytic perovskite, namely cerium-doped strontium ferrate (CSF). The thermocatalytic activity of CSF offers the opportunity to degrade organic pollutants with no light and without input of chemical oxidants, providing simplicity of operation. Moreover, our studies on real samples of secondary effluent from wastewater treatment showed that the thermocatalyst has the ability to degrade also part of the non-toxic organic matter, which allows for reducing the chemical oxygen demand of the retentate and mitigating membrane fouling during filtration. Therefore, the new technology is effective in the production of clean feed and permeate and has a potential to be used in degradation of micropollutants in water treatment.