The increasing rate of oil and gas production has contributed to a release of oil/water emulsion or mixtures to the environment, becoming a pressing issue. At the same time, pollution of the toxic cigarette butt has also become a growing concern. This study explored utilization of cigarette butt waste as a source of cellulose acetate-based (CA) polymer to develop a phase inverted membrane for treatment of oil/water emulsion and compare it with commercial polyvinylidene difluoride (PVDF) and polysulfone (PSF). Results show that the CA-based membrane from waste cigarette butt offers an eco-friendly material without compromising the separation efficiency, with a pore size range suitable for oil/water emulsion filtration with the rejection of >94.0%. The CA membrane poses good structural property similar to the established PVDF and PSF membranes with equally asymmetric morphology. It also poses hydrophilicity properties with a contact angle of 74.5°, lower than both PVDF and PSF membranes. The pore size of CA demonstrates that the CA is within the microfiltration range with a mean flow pore size of 0.17 µm. The developed CA membrane shows a promising oil/water emulsion permeability of 180 L m-2 h-1 bar-1 after five filtration cycles. However, it still suffers a high degree of irreversible fouling (>90.0%), suggesting potential future improvements in terms of membrane fouling management. Overall, this study demonstrates a sustainable approach to addressing oil/water emulsion pollution treated CA membrane from cigarette butt waste.
This paper introduces a new spark plasma sintering technique that is able to order crystalline anisotropy by in-series/in situ DC electric coupled magnetic field. The process control parameters have been investigated on the production of anisotropic BaFe12O19 magnets based on resulted remanence (Mr). Sintering holding time (H.T.), cooling rate (C.R.), pressure (P), and sintering temperature (S.T.) are optimized by Taguchi with L9 orthogonal array (OA). The remanent magnetization of nanocrystalline BaFe12O19 in parallel (Mrǁ) and perpendicular (MrꞱ) to the applied magnetic field was regarded as a measure of performance. The Taguchi study calculated optimum process parameters, which significantly improved the sintering process based on the confirmation tests of BaFe12O19 anisotropy. The magnetic properties in terms of Mrǁ and MrꞱ were greatly affected by sintering temperature and pressure according to ANOVA results. In addition, regression models were developed for predicting the Mrǁ as well as MrꞱ respectively.