Liquid Crystal-Based Water Treatment Membranes

Water pollution is on the rise across the world and must be tackled since it leads to water shortage and poor water quality in the near future. Water has been cleaned and renewed using a variety of processes, but each has its own set of limitations. In this context, the membrane technology-based strategy is one among the various available strategies and, moreover, it has the potentiality to tackle these problems in a more effective way. Furthermore, one of the ongoing challenges in this area of research is to identify the new and cost-effective membranes for water treatment. Among the newly available various materials, certain materials such as carbon nanotubes and polymerized liquid crystals have attracted a great deal of interest and the pore alignments in these materials is generally a vital factor for the high water permeability, thus the pore alignment can be easily achieved for polymerized liquid crystals than for carbon nanotubes. Therefore, a critical and complete review of emerging trends in liquid crystal-based polymer membranes for wastewater treatment is presented in this paper. Further, the different types of membranes based on the type of liquid crystal, properties, water treatment performances, advantages, and limitations have been discussed.