A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF POROUS SUPPORT FROM SAYONG AND KANKARA CLAY Maisarah Mohamed Bazin 1 , Muazu Abubakar 2 , *Norhayati Ahmad 3 1,2,3 Department of Materials, Manufacturing and Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81300 Johor Bahru, Johor, MALAYSIA Email: 1 maisarahbazin@yahoo.com, 2 muazumani2004@yahoo.com *Corresponding author: 3 nhayati@fkm.utm.my, Tel: 07- 5534676 A porous supports were fabricated from Sayong ball clay and Kankara clay for wastewater treatment application using simple compaction method. The influence of sintering temperature (900-1200 °C) and starch addition (5-30 wt%) on the physical properties and flexural strength of the porous support were studied. Thermo-gravimetric analysis, particle size distribution, microstructure, phase, porosimetry analysis and strength analysis were studied to characterize the porous supports. The apparent porosity and pore diameter of Kankara porous support (48-55%; 6.62nm) was found to be higher than that of Sayong porous support (0.07-40%; 5.11nm). In contrast, the bulk density of Sayong porous support (1.15-1.93g/cm 3 ) was higher than that of Kankara porous support (1.08-1.25g/cm 3 ). However, the flexural strength of Kankara porous support (34-3MPa) shows sharp decrease compared with Sayong porous support (21-9MPa). This shows that Sayong porous support has better physical properties and flexural strength compared with Kankara porous support. Starch has been a good pore former in fabrication of the ceramic membrane. Sintering temperature and starch content have strong influence on the physical and flexural strength of the porous support. Therefore, the properties of the porous support can be varied by controlling the sintering temperature and starch content. Keywords: Porous support, compaction, sintering temperature, flexural strength. Introduction Ceramic materials offer some excellent advantages such as high chemical and thermal stability, separation efficiency, and high-pressure resistance compared to the polymeric membrane counterparts in many industrials processes such as membrane for wastewater treatment (Sarkar et al., 2012). The properties of clay mineral as membrane material in terms of mechanical, chemical and thermal properties can be compared with those of engineering ceramics and superior than polymer. These materials are cheap to process in terms of materials cost and sintering temperature. Due to the high cost of engineering ceramics, clay minerals have been used to produce porous materials in novel areas such as membrane, gas filters, molten metal filters and gas sensors. Clay minerals can be a source of ceramic materials such as mullite, cristobalite and nephiline syenite ceramics (Castelein et al., 2001; Jana et al., 2010). Clays are normally used to refractories and to increase the refractoriness of ceramic bodies. These natural deposits can be used directly without any upgrade in the quality. Clay-based porous support is still under the development stage. Clay-based ceramic membranes from Morocco and Tunisia were reported for the treatment of solution containing dyes, salts , tannery, textile, electronic cuttlefish effluents from industries (Saffaj et al., 2006; Khemakhem et al., 2009; Majouli et al., 2011). In addition, the potential use of these membranes for microfiltration and ultrafiltration applications in the chemistry, food, and biotechnology industry have been reported (Jana et al., 2010; Emani et al.,2013a; Emani et al., 2013b). Characterization in terms of thermal and physical properties of membranes depicts the suitability of particular membrane for a specific application. For optimum