Precision tools for creating and characterizing membranes and modules, including flat sheet and hollow fiber media.
Precision tools for creating and characterizing membranes and modules, including flat sheet and hollow fiber media.
Discover some MemSystems instrument applications
MemSystems instruments add real value to any membrane laboratory—whether you’re casting flat sheet membranes, potting and trimming hollow fiber media, or accelerating membrane performance screening.
Our portfolio includes instruments for both sample preparation and analysis, empowering your lab to achieve greater consistency, efficiency, and throughput in membrane research and development.
Sample preparation of flat sheet membranes
Flat sheet membranes are widely used in various separation processes, including microfiltration, ultrafiltration, nanofiltration, gas separation, and electrodialysis. These processes are vital across many industries, such as wastewater treatment, fuel cell technology, food and beverage processing, and medical applications like hemodialysis.
Before scaling up to full production, researchers must develop and fine-tune membrane properties at the laboratory scale. This is where the MemCast™ automatic casting machine becomes essential. It enables precise, reproducible casting of flat sheet membranes, minimizing solution waste and ensuring consistent membrane properties—critical for comparative testing and development in early-stage R&D.
After casting, the membranes can be characterized using our capillary flow porometers: the POROLUX™ or POROLIQ™ series to determine parameters such as pore sizes and pore size distribution.
MemCast™: Empowering flexible and efficient lab-scale casting
In addition to characterisation, VITO also modernised its lab-scale casting workflow. As a complement to its existing precision pilot casting line, the team integrated MemCast™, a user-friendly lab-scale casting device also provided by Aptco Technologies. Both Porometer and MemCast are brands of Aptco Technologies – a manufacturer of measurement instruments and testing equipment for academic and industrial quality control and research labs.
The MemCast™ replaces an outdated setup and supports early-stage membrane synthesis with increased process control, ease of use, and flexibility. This allows VITO to rapidly prototype and iterate in small batches before scaling up, reducing material waste and optimising formulation efficiency.
Sample preparation of hollow fiber membranes
Hollow fiber membranes are key components in processes such as water purification, kidney dialysis, and biopharmaceutical filtration. Once a small batch of hollow fibers is fabricated, they must be properly prepared for testing. This preparation typically involves potting/sealing the fiber ends to ensure that flow is forced through the fiber walls, rather than escaping from the open ends, and trimming.
The RotaMem system simplifies and standardizes this potting step. Through centrifugal casting followed by heated curing, it ensures homogeneous and defect-free sealing using two-component glues (e.g., polyurethane or epoxy). This eliminates variability and reduces time spent on a traditionally manual and error-prone process.
Once cured, the potted modules can be trimmed cleanly and uniformly with MemCut, which delivers precise cuts even for hardened resin blocks.
After preparation, hollow fiber membranes can be analyzed using the POROLUX™ Revo or POROLIQ™ systems, enabling a detailed assessment of their pore sizes.
High-throughput filtration testing
In membrane development, researchers often need to evaluate the performance of multiple membranes under the same conditions—for example, when comparing different polymer compositions, casting parameters or post-treatments. This is especially common in early-stage material screening, formulation optimization, and quality control in membrane R&D labs.
Traditional single-sample testing is time-consuming and can introduce variability across tests. To overcome this, high-throughput testing enables simultaneous filtration of multiple membrane samples, ensuring faster data collection and more reliable comparisons.
The Spider is designed to streamline this step. It allows for parallel dead-end filtrations of 8 or 16 flat sheet membranes, using water- or solvent-based solutions. This makes it ideal for:
- Rapid screening of new membrane formulations
- Stability and chemical resistance testing
- Comparative performance evaluations under different process conditions
- Routine quality control checks in lab-scale production
By accelerating the testing workflow while maintaining precise conditions, the Spider helps researchers focus more on membrane performance—and less on manual handling.
