Ceramic membranes have drawn increasing attention in oily wastewater treatment as an alternative to their traditional polymeric counterparts, yet persistent membrane fouling is still one of the largest challenges. Particularly, little is known about ceramic membrane fouling by oil-in-water (O/W) emulsions in constant flux filtration modes. In this study, the effects of emulsion chemistry (surfactant concentration, pH, salinity and Ca²⁺) and operation parameters (permeate flux and filtration time) were comparatively evaluated for alumina and silicon carbide (SiC) deposited ceramic membranes, with different physicochemical surface properties. The original membranes were made of 100% alumina, while the same membranes were also deposited with a SiC layer to change the surface charge and hydrophilicity. The SiC-deposited membrane showed a lower reversible and irreversible fouling when permeate flux was below 110 L m⁻² h⁻¹. In addition, it exhibited a higher permeance recovery after physical and chemical cleaning, as compared to the alumina membranes. Increasing sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) concentration in the feed decreased the fouling of both membranes, but to a higher extent in the alumina membranes. The fouling of both membranes could be reduced with increasing the pH of the emulsion due to the enhanced electrostatic repulsion between oil droplets and membrane surface. Because of the screening of surface charge in a high salinity solution (100 mM NaCl), only a small difference in irreversible fouling was observed for alumina and SiC-deposited membranes under these conditions. The presence of Ca²⁺ in the emulsion led to high irreversible fouling of both membranes, because of the compression of diffusion double layer and the interactions between Ca²⁺ and SDS. The low fouling tendency and/or high cleaning efficiency of the SiC-deposited membranes indicated their potential for oily wastewater treatment.

Silicon carbide (SiC) ceramic membranes are of particular significance for wastewater treatment due to their mechanical strength, chemical stability, and antifouling ability. Currently, the membranes are prepared by SiC-particle sintering at a high temperature. The production suffers from long production time and high costs. In this paper, we demonstrated a more economical way to produce SiC ultrafiltration membranes based on low-pressure chemical vapor deposition (LPCVD). SiC was deposited in the pores of alumina microfiltration supports using two precursors (SiH₂Cl₂ and C₂H₂/H₂) at a relatively low temperature of 750 °C. Different deposition times varying from 0 to 150 min were used to tune membrane pore size. The pure water permeance of the membranes only decreased from 350 Lm⁻²h⁻¹bar⁻¹ to 157 Lm⁻²h⁻¹bar⁻¹ when the deposition time was increased from 0 to 120 min due to the narrowing of membrane pore size from 71 to 47 nm. Increasing the deposition time from 120 to 150 min mainly resulted in the formation of a thin, dense layer on top of the support instead of in the pores. Oil-in-water emulsion filtration experiments illustrated that both the reversible and irreversible fouling of the SiC-deposited UF membrane was considerably lower as compared to the pristine alumina support. The unique feature that pore sizes decrease linearly as a function of SiC deposition time creates opportunities to produce low-fouling SiC membranes with tuned pore sizes on relatively cheap support.