ABSTRACT
Membranes provide advantages over other water treatment technologies, such as disinfection, distillation, or media filtration, due to their ease of operation, which does not require chemical additives, thermal inputs, or the regeneration of spent media. The layer-by-layer (LBL) assembly technique has great potential for the fabrication of ultra-thin defect free membranes with improved permeation and rejection properties, since the thickness and morphology of the membrane can be easily controlled. Many studies have shown that LbL modified membranes can be potentially used for important water treatment processes, such as nanofiltration, reverse osmosis, forward osmosis and pervaporation. Reverse osmosis membranes are commonly used for removing dissolved salts and other minerals from sea water and brackish water. Recently, forward osmosis has received significant attention for water treatment due to its low energy requirement. Pervaporation can be used as an alternative to distillation for separating organic compounds from water.
