Membrane technologies have been successfully developed as the separation and purification processes, such as desalination, wastewater treatment, gas separation and so forth. It is known that membrane pore size and pore size distribution (PSD) are the factors by which membrane performance is significantly affected. In this study, a novel mathematical model is presented to evaluate the PSD. Although the new model is based on the bubble gas transport method, it is different from the conventional approach since this model starts from the assumption of a distribution function, typically Gaussian normal distribution, for the PSD, and a flow rate versus pressure line is drawn theoretically based on the assumed PDS. Then, the mean pore size and standard deviation of the PSD are optimized by the best fit of the theoretical line to the experimental one using the nonlinear regression analysis. A unique feature of the proposed model is that fewer experimental data points are necessary to find the optimal PSD. In addition, experiments with the dry membrane are no longer required. The PSDs estimated by this model for three commercial membranes were compared with those obtained by the conventional method, and an excellent agreement was observed.

膜技术已成功开发为海水淡化、废水处理、气体分离等分离纯化工艺。众所周知，膜孔径和孔径分布（PSD）是显着影响膜性能的因素。在这项研究中，提出了一种新的数学模型来评估 PSD。虽然新模型基于气泡气体传输方法，但它与传统方法不同，因为该模型从对 PSD 的分布函数（通常为高斯正态分布）的假设开始，并绘制了流量与压力的线理论上基于假设的 PDS。然后，PSD的平均孔径和标准偏差通过使用非线性回归分析的理论线与实验线的最佳拟合进行优化。所提出模型的一个独特之处在于，找到最佳 PSD 所需的实验数据点较少。此外，不再需要对干膜进行实验。将通过该模型估计的三种商业膜的 PSD 与通过常规方法获得的 PSD 进行比较，观察到了极好的一致性。