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The history of membrane filters goes back to the beginning of  life, as all living organism have membranes with some degree of permeability. Our personal membranes play an important part in our lives as they allow oxygen to be transferred from the air to our cells, food to be absorbed into our cells, and wastes to becleaned from our cells and body. We would not exist without natural membranes. Humans first used natural membranes from animals, including intestines and stomachs as a filtration and separation media. Natural membranes have limited permeability, selectivity, and porosity since they evolved for a specific bodily function, not to provide a filtration matrix for other purposes.
It was not until 1918 that the first commercially viable synthetic membrane was developed, and it was not until the 1950’s before they started to find applications outside the laboratory. This makes synthetic membranes a relatively recent development in filtration media.
Membranes are a very important filtration media. Without synthetic membranes, society would not have many of the safe and effective pharmaceuticals enjoyed today, foods and beverages would suffer from less flavor or shorter shelf life, and computers, cell phones, LCD and Plasma televisions would not exist or would be so large that they would require a truck to make them portable.
Membranes also play an important role in health care, as they are also critical to several life-saving medical devices, including dialysis and blood oxygenation. Membranes have had a dynamic past and have extensive current applications and a bright future. Alternative fuels, clean water, energy reduction,waste minimization, CO2 Reduction, and Sequestration all have a future potential role for membranes.
Tisch PES membrane filter
Present
While the materials, morphologies, formats, and surface functionalities have been relatively stagnant in the recent past, that does not mean membrane technologies and applications have been stagnant. In their more recent history, membranes are being lead by the growth in their applications and changing application demands. A general trend that continues today is the demand for finer pore size microporous membrane filters from the standard in the 1980’s, primarily down to 0.1 μm, to the growing demand for PES membranes down to 0.01μm. While the technology to make membranes with this low a pore size rating was available in the late 1980’s, they were not effective, as they had virtually no flow rate.