An Experimental Study of Transport Properties of Ceramic Membranes for Use in Hemodialysis

Hemodialysis (HD) remains the primary treatment modality for the management of renal failure patients. Hemodialysis membranes play an important role in renal replacement therapy (RRT). HD is an extracorporeal blood clean process where the major mass transfer mechanism is diffusion. This therapy is mainly effectual for low molecular weight (LMW) solutes (such as urea and creatinine) removal or clearance for which diffusive mass transfer is a swift process. There is an increase in the removal of middle molecular weight (MMW) solutes (such as β2-microglobulin) when high flux membranes are available. Hemodiafiltration (HDF) is a treatment where the convective mass transfer accolades with diffusive mass transfer to increase the solute clearance efficacy, specifically for MMW solutes. The convective mass transfer is reliant on the amount of fluid exchanged. Toxin removal efficiency of HDF significantly depends on the porosity, pore size, pore distribution and surface area of the membrane ^{[1, 2]}. Although newly developed high flux polysulfone membranes have high MMW solute clearance, the non-uniform pore size and pore distribution is the main contributors to the albumin loss. Previous studies by Huang et al.^[3], showed that nanoporous alumina sheet membranes have uniform pore size (∼ 10nm), high hydraulic permeability, uniform pore distribution and excellent pore structure with uniform channels. It was predicted that these membranes would have high molecular removal capacity. Therefore, in this study, experiments were performed to generate the data of intrinsic membrane properties such as hydraulic permeability, sieving coefficient and solute diffusive permeability for the alumina tubular membranes. Results were also compared to current polyethersulfone (PES) dialysis membranes.