scholarly journals Filtration Performances of Different Polysaccharides in Microfiltration Process

Processes ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (12) ◽  
pp. 897
Author(s):  
Shujuan Meng ◽  
Hongju Liu ◽  
Qian Zhao ◽  
Nan Shen ◽  
Minmin Zhang

Membrane technology has been widely applied for water treatment, while membrane fouling still remains a big challenge. The polysaccharides in extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) have been known as a significant type of foulant due to their high fouling propensity. However, polysaccharides have many varieties which definitely behave differently in membrane filtration. Therefore, in this study, different polysaccharides alginate sodium and xanthan gum were chosen to study their effects on membrane fouling in a wide concentration range. The results demonstrated that the filtration behaviors of alginate sodium and xanthan gum were completely different, which was due to their different molecular structures. Alginate had a small molecular weight and it was easy for alginate to penetrate membrane pores resulting in pore blocking. A series of concentrations of alginate including 5 mg/L, 10 mg/L, 20 mg/L, 30 mg/L, 40 mg/L, and 50 mg/L were examined and it was found that the permeate flux decline highly depended on the level of alginate in the feed water. While for the filtration of xanthan gum, the same concentration of xanthan gum led to more serious fouling than that observed in alginate, which might be due to its large molecule. In addition, calcium chloride was added in the solutions of both alginate and xanthan gum to examine the influence of a divalent cation on polysaccharide fouling. A “unimodal” peak can be observed in the fouling propensity caused by Ca2+ and alginate with increasing the concentration of alginate. Such a phenomenon was not found in the fouling of xanthan gum and Ca2+ led to more serious fouling for all concentrations of xanthan gum. In light of this, this study gave new insights into the fouling propensities of different polysaccharides.

Membranes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 990
Author(s):  
Xianghao Meng ◽  
Fukuan Wang ◽  
Shujuan Meng ◽  
Rui Wang ◽  
Zhongyuan Mao ◽  
...  

It is difficult to recognize specific fouling mechanisms due to the complexity of practical feed water, thus the current studies usually employ foulant surrogates to carry out research, such as alginate and xanthan gum. However, the representativeness of these surrogates is questionable. In this work, the classical surrogates (i.e., alginate and xanthan gum) were systematically studied, and results showed that they behaved differently during filtration. For the mixture of alginate and xanthan gum, both filtration behaviors and adsorption tests performed by quartz-crystal microbalance with dissipation monitoring (QCM-D) indicated that alginate plays a leading role in fouling development. Furthermore, by examining the filtration behaviors of extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) extracted from practical source water, it turns out that the gel layer formation is responsible for EPS fouling, and the properties of gel layer formed by EPS share more similarities with that formed from pectin instead of alginate. In addition, with the use of experimental data sets extracted from this study and our previous studies, a modeling method was established and tested by the support vector machine (SVM) to predict complex filtration behaviors. Results showed that the small differences of fouling mechanisms lying between alginate and pectin cannot be recognized by Hermia’s models, and SVM can show a discrimination as high as 76.92%. As such, SVM may be a powerful tool to predict complex filtration behaviors.


Membranes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 460
Author(s):  
Bastiaan Blankert ◽  
Bart Van der Bruggen ◽  
Amy E. Childress ◽  
Noreddine Ghaffour ◽  
Johannes S. Vrouwenvelder

The manner in which membrane-fouling experiments are conducted and how fouling performance data are represented have a strong impact on both how the data are interpreted and on the conclusions that may be drawn. We provide a couple of examples to prove that it is possible to obtain misleading conclusions from commonly used representations of fouling data. Although the illustrative example revolves around dead-end ultrafiltration, the underlying principles are applicable to a wider range of membrane processes. When choosing the experimental conditions and how to represent fouling data, there are three main factors that should be considered: (I) the foulant mass is principally related to the filtered volume; (II) the filtration flux can exacerbate fouling effects (e.g., concentration polarization and cake compression); and (III) the practice of normalization, as in dividing by an initial value, disregards the difference in driving force and divides the fouling effect by different numbers. Thus, a bias may occur that favors the experimental condition with the lower filtration flux and the less-permeable membrane. It is recommended to: (I) avoid relative fouling performance indicators, such as relative flux decline (J/J0); (II) use resistance vs. specific volume; and (III) use flux-controlled experiments for fouling performance evaluation.


2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. e12599 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ye Sun ◽  
Zhen Qin ◽  
Liming Zhao ◽  
Qiming Chen ◽  
Qingyun Hou ◽  
...  

2006 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. Harif ◽  
M. Hai ◽  
A. Adin

Electroflocculation (EF) is a coagulation/flocculation process in which active coagulant species are generated in situ by electrolytic oxidation of an appropriate anode material. The effect of colloidal suspension pretreatment by EF on membrane fouling was measured by flux decline at constant pressure. An EF cell was operated in batch mode and comprised two flat sheet electrodes, an aluminium anode and stainless steel cathode, which were immersed in the treated suspension, and connected to an external DC power supply. The cell was run at constant current between 0.06–0.2A. The results show that pre-EF enhances the permeate flux at pH 5 and 6.5, but only marginal improvement is observed at pH 8. At all pH values cake formation on the membrane surface was observed. The differences in membrane behavior can be explained by conventional coagulation theory and transitions between aluminium mononuclear species which affect particle characteristics and consequently cake properties. At pH 6.5, where sweep floc mechanism dominates due to increased precipitation of aluminium hydroxide, increased flux rates were observed. It is evident that EF can serve as an efficient pretreatment to ultrafiltration of colloid particles.


2006 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
pp. 61-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
L.F. Song ◽  
K.G. Tay ◽  
G. Singh

In this paper, the performance of the full-scale RO process with highly permeable membranes and the governing mechanisms were carefully studied. It was found that the performance of a full-scale RO process could be controlled by two possible mechanisms, namely mass transfer rate and thermodynamic limitations. Under relatively low driving pressure, it was controlled by mass transfer rate (water flux) of the membrane. However, with the highly permeable membrane, it is possible that the performance is limited by the thermodynamic limitation, in which the osmotic pressure becomes equal to the driving pressure inside of the membrane channel. A process controlled by thermodynamic limitation is an extremely case of the hydraulic imbalance problem. When it occurs, it means part of the membranes in the processes do not contribute to permeate production. More complicated are situations in the intermediate pressure range, in which both mechanisms contribute to, but none of them can dominate, the performance of the process. Some innovative concepts and theories on the performance of the full-scale RO processes were developed. These concepts and theories may provide better qualitative explanations for the behaviors often observed in the full-scale RO processes. A better quantitative simulations or predictions of the performance of the process were developed upon these concepts and theories. Experiments were carried out on a pilot membrane process of 6 m membrane channel to imitate the performance of the full-scale RO under various conditions. The experimental performance data were compared with theoretical simulations and excellent agreement was obtained. Another focus of this current study was on characterization and modeling of membrane fouling in the full-scale RO process. Colloidal fouling experiments were conducted to study the fouling potential of feed water and a new fouling indicator was proposed. The indicator can be directly used in the mathematical model to simulate fouling development in the full-scale RO processes. Model simulations showed that under certain condition (thermodynamic restriction), the recovery or average permeate flux of a full-scale RO process would maintain a constant value even membrane fouling was taking place. Experimental verification of the simulation results is currently under way. With the new developments and findings in this area, methods or protocols for optimization of full-scale processes of the highly permeable RO membranes were suggested.


2008 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marek Gryta

AbstractMembrane distillation was used to produce demineralized water from ground water. The influence of feed water pretreatment carried out in a contact clarifier (softening with Ca(OH)2 and coagulation with FeSO4 · 7H2O) followed by filtration, on the process effectiveness was evaluated. It was found that the chemical pretreatment decreased the membrane fouling; however, the degree of water purification was insufficient because precipitation of small amounts of deposit on the membrane surface during the process operation was still observed. The permeate flux was gradually decreasing as a result of scaling. The morphology and composition of the fouling layer were studied using scanning electron microscopy coupled with energy dispersion spectrometry. The presence of significant amounts of silica, apart from calcium and magnesium, was determined in the formed deposit. The removal of foulants by heterogeneous crystallization performed inside the filter (70 mesh), assembled directly at the module inlet, was found to be a solution preventing the membrane scaling.


2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
pp. 490-500 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yufei Wang ◽  
Hui Jia ◽  
Hongwei Zhang ◽  
Jie Wang ◽  
Wenjin Liu

A recycling magnetic flocculation membrane filtration (RMFMF) process integrating circulating coagulation, magnetic enhanced flocculation and membrane filtration was investigated for the treatment of surface water micro-polluted by tetracycline, a typical pharmaceutical and personal care product. A bench-scale experiment was conducted and several water quality parameters including turbidity, ultraviolet absorbance at 254 nm (UV254), total organic carbon and tetracycline concentration were evaluated, taking coagulation membrane filtration and magnetic flocculation membrane filtration processes as reference treatments. The experimental results showed that at the optimum doses of 20 mg·L−1 ferric chloride (FeCl3), 4 mg·L−1 magnetite (Fe3O4) and 6 mg·L−1 reclaimed magnetic flocs in RMFMF processes, removal efficiencies of above evaluated parameters ranged from 55.8% to 92.9%, which performed best. Simultaneously, the largest average particle size of 484.71 μm and the highest fractal dimension of 1.37 of flocs were achieved, which did not only present the best coagulation effect helpful in enhancing the performance of removing multiple contaminants, but also lead to the generation of loose and porous cake layers favouring reduced permeate flux decline and membrane fouling.


2011 ◽  
Vol 64 (8) ◽  
pp. 1685-1691 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. Li ◽  
B. Z. Dong ◽  
Z. Liu ◽  
W. H. Chu

Algogenic organic matter (AOM) was extracted from blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) and its characteristic was determined by various methods including high-pressure size-exclusion chromatography (HP-SEC), hydrophobic and hydrophilic fractionation, molecular weight (MW) fractionation and fluorescence excitation emission matrix (EEM). The results revealed that AOM was hydrophilic fractionation predominantly, accounting for 78%. The specific ultraviolet absorbance of AOM was 1.1 L/(mg m) only. The analysis for MW distribution demonstrated that organic matter greater than 30,000 MW accounted for over 40% and was composed of mostly neutral hydrophilic compound. EEM analyses revealed that protein-like and humic-substances existed in AOM. A test for membrane filtration exhibited that AOM could make ultrafiltration membrane substantial flux decline, which can be attributed to membrane pore clog caused by neutral hydrophilic compound with larger MW.


2006 ◽  
Vol 60 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Karakulski ◽  
M. Gryta ◽  
M. Sasim

AbstractApplication of ultrafiltration, nanofiltration, reverse osmosis, membrane distillation, and integrated membrane processes for the preparation of process water from natural water or industrial effluents was investigated. A two-stage reverse osmosis plant enabled almost complete removal of solutes from the feed water. High-purity water was prepared using the membrane distillation. However, during this process a rapid membrane fouling and permeate flux decline was observed when the tap water was used as a feed. The precipitation of deposit in the modules was limited by the separation of sparingly soluble salts from the feed water in the nanofiltration. The combined reverse osmosis—membrane distillation process prevented the formation of salt deposits on the membranes employed for the membrane distillation. Ultrafiltration was found to be very effective removing trace amounts of oil from the feed water. Then the ultrafiltration permeate was used for feeding of the remaining membrane modules resulting in the total removal of oil residue contamination. The ultrafiltration allowed producing process water directly from the industrial effluents containing petroleum derivatives.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Westphalen Dornelas Camara Heloisa

Membrane separation processes have been more widely applied to industrial activities, especially in water and wastewater treatment. However, there are still challenges associated to the use of membranes. Concentration polarization and fouling can cause significant permeate flux decay during the filtration process, hindering its efficiency and increasing cost. Among many strategies, the combination of membrane filtration with ultrasound (US) application has shown promising results in reducing membrane fouling. The main goal of this research was to identify the effect of US frequency, US power intensity and feed solution concentration on permeate flux during ultrafiltration of simulated latex paint effluent. Maximum increase in permeate flux of 19.7% was obtained by applying 20 kHz and 0.29 W.cm-2 to feed solution with 0.075 wt.% of solid concentration. The effect of feed flow rate was analyzed showing that an increase in feed flowrate is not beneficial to the fouling minimization process. Overall, the application of US improves permeate flux by reducing fouling of ultrafiltration polymeric membrane.


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