Practical limits of the quartz crystal microbalance and surface plasmon resonance for elucidating salt or ion partitioning into membrane polymers Author links open overlay panel

Determining the partitioning of sodium chloride into polyamide (PA) reverse osmosis membranes used for seawater desalination is indispensable for optimizing the salt retention of the membranes. Furthermore, the recent quest for ion-selective membranes requires physico-chemical characterization techniques capable of elucidating partitioning phenomena of ions into membrane polymers in general. Quartz-crystal microbalance with dissipation monitoring (QCM-D) has been explored for this purpose as it has in theory a sensitivity in the range of pg/cm² and is an accessible and apparently simple method to use. However, it is a technique that intrinsically lacks an internal reference, and it is affected by liquid bulk changes. As the conventional applications of QCM-D are of biophysical nature where changes in solute concentrations are in the nano to micromolar range, we investigated systematically in how far QCM-D yields reliable results for determining salt partitioning coefficients at concentrations relevant for the industrial-scale. We could clearly demonstrate that QCM-D possibly detects salt absorption only at salt concentrations higher than that in seawater (0.6 M). Furthermore, the variation in the liquid bulk response was so significant that it overlapped with a possibly perceived response due to salt absorption. Therefore, we concluded that salt partitioning coefficients derived from QCM-D data have a low confidence and, in any case, should always be reported accompanied by the raw data. We corroborated these findings with multi-parameter surface plasmon resonance (MP-SPR) which widely confirmed the trends observed with QCM-D.