Pervaporative desalination of concentrated brine solution employing crosslinked PVA/silicate nanoclay membranes

•Laponite/PVA membrane was designed and fabricated.•Laponite was first reported as nanofiller for pervaporation process.•Treating traditional desalination process by-product (brine solution) of 50,000 ppm NaCl concentration.•High water flux (37 kg/m2 h) with high salt rejection (99.98%) was achieved for 7 wt% laponite membrane. Laponite nanodiscs are low cost synthetic silicate clay with extreme hydrophilic behavior. Therefore, laponite can be used to enhance pervaporation membranes’ performance. Poly(vinyl alcohol), (PVA)/laponite pervaporation membranes were fabricated via simple exfoliation method of the nanoclay in the polymer solution followed by chemical crosslinking using glutaraldehyde (GA). The fabricated membranes were employed to study the pervaporation desalination performance when treating reverse osmosis (RO) concentrated brine solution. The effect of nanofiller concentration on membrane properties, as well as the water diffusion coefficient through the membrane, swelling measurements was investigated. The highest rejection of ∼99.98% was achieved using 7 wt% laponite nanocomposite membrane at 40 °C with a flux of 31.2 kg/m2 h. Increasing the feed concentration resulted in a decrease in water flux, whereas the salt rejection was negligibly changed. The influence of the operating temperature and feed salt concentration on the desalination performance 7 wt% laponite nanocomposite membrane (PVA7) were obtained at different temperatures in the range between 30 °C and 70 °C and feed concentration up to 100,000 ppm the temperature profile is expressed by Arrhenius relationship.