No Cover Image

Journal article 681 views 208 downloads

Polymer Membranes – Fractal Characteristics and Determination of Roughness Scaling Exponents

Daniel Johnson Orcid Logo, Nidal Hilal

Journal of Membrane Science, Volume: 570, Pages: 9 - 22

Swansea University Authors: Daniel Johnson Orcid Logo, Nidal Hilal

  • johnson2018.pdf

    PDF | Accepted Manuscript

    Released under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives License (CC-BY-NC-ND).

    Download (10.32MB)

Check full text

DOI (Published version): 10.1016/j.memsci.2018.10.024

Abstract

Surface roughness is a parameter widely reported when characterising membrane surfaces, due to its effect on membrane properties, such as fouling / biofouling and wetting. However, a surface does not have a single roughness value, rather the magnitude of measured roughness is dependent on the length...

Full description

Published in: Journal of Membrane Science
ISSN: 0376-7388
Published: 2019
Online Access: Check full text

URI: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa44786
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Abstract: Surface roughness is a parameter widely reported when characterising membrane surfaces, due to its effect on membrane properties, such as fouling / biofouling and wetting. However, a surface does not have a single roughness value, rather the magnitude of measured roughness is dependent on the length scales of measurement. Here, we report findings from roughness measurements of several commercial filtration membrane surfaces using atomic force microscopy. All membranes showed self-affine behaviour at scan sizes below approximately 10 μm, where the magnitude of root mean squared roughness, Rq, was described by both the scan length and an exponential factor, H. Furthermore we show that values of H can be obtained from power spectra of AFM images using a relatively simple approach. Using values of H and Rq obtained at a single scan size from image power spectra allowed us to estimate, within reasonable error, Rq values at other scan size, below a cross-over length. Above this crossover length roughness scaling was linear, rather than exponential for the membranes studied.
Keywords: Polymer membrane; roughness; atomic force microscopy; roughness scaling; surface characterization
Start Page: 9
End Page: 22

Similar Items