Mohammed Al-Farsi

Sultan Qaboos University / Membrane Distillation

Advisor: Prof. Said Al-Hinai

Mohammed Al-Farsi develops electrospun omniphobic polyvinylidene fluoride membranes for membrane distillation of oil and gas produced water — a wastewater stream with salinities up to 200,000 mg/L TDS and high concentrations of surfactants and low-surface-energy hydrocarbons that cause catastrophic wetting of conventional hydrophobic MD membranes. At Sultan Qaboos University's Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, supervised by Prof. Said Al-Hinai, Mohammed uses a co-solvent electrospinning system with a fluorosilane re-entrant-geometry dopant to fabricate membranes with apparent water contact angles above 155° and hexadecane contact angles of 120° — omniphobicity simultaneously repelling both aqueous and oily fouling agents. His SEM morphology studies reveal that a bi-layer architecture — a dense fibre skin (0.5–1 µm diameter) over a coarser support structure (2–4 µm) — provides the optimal combination of liquid entry pressure resistance and vapour permeability for direct contact MD operation. Long-term 200-hour flux tests with 100,000 mg/L NaCl produced-water simulant spiked with 200 mg/L crude oil show 97% salt rejection maintenance — versus 62% rejection after 48 hours with a commercial PTFE membrane benchmark. Mohammed's research is funded partly through an Oman LNG produced-water valorisation project and will be presented at the IDA World Congress on Desalination in 2026.