No abstract

No abstract

Use of tight ultrafiltration (UF) membranes has created a new pathway in fractionation of dye/salt mixtures from textile wastewater for sustainable resource recovery. Unexpectedly, a consistently high rejection for the dyes with smaller sizes related to the pore sizes of tight UF membranes is yielded. The potential mechanism involved in this puzzle remains unclear. In this study, seven tailored UF membranes with molecular weight cut-offs (MWCOs) from 6050 to 17530 Da were applied to separate dye/salt mixtures. These UF membranes allowed a complete transfer for NaCl and NaSO, due to large pore sizes. Additionally, these UF membranes had acceptably high rejections for direct and reactive dyes, due to the aggregation of dyes as clusters for enhanced sizes and low diffusivity. Specifically, the membrane with an MWCO of 7310 Da showed a complete rejection for reactive blue 2 and direct dyes. An integrated UF-diafiltration process was subsequently designed for fractionation of reactive blue 2/NaSO mixture, achieving 99.84% desalination efficiency and 97.47% dye recovery. Furthermore, reactive blue 2 can be concentrated from 2.01 to 31.80 g·L. These results indicate that UF membranes even with porous structures are promising for effective fractionation of dyes and salts in sustainable textile wastewater treatment.

In this work, textile wastewater is explored for resource recovery in a hybrid loose nanofiltration (NF)-bipolar membrane electrodialysis (BMED) process for fractionation of dyes and salt, in view of dye purification and water and salt reuse. A loose nanofiltration membrane, i.e., Sepro NF 6 (Ultura), found to have a low salt rejection (0.27% in 120 g· L −1 NaCl solution) and high rejection for direct dyes and reactive dyes (≥99.93%), was used for fractionation of dye/salt mixtures through diafiltration. In diafiltration, the addition of pure water with a volume factor of 5.0 can effectively remove the NaCl salt by using Sepro NF 6 with an invariable dye concentration, in view of the recovery of high purity dyes. The overall salt rejections in diafiltration for the dye/salt mixtures with 40, 50 and 60 g·L −1 NaCl are 2.2%, 1.8% and 1.1%, respectively, enabling a further treatment by BMED. Subsequently, application of BMED for reuse of salt-containing NF permeate demonstrates that desalinated water with ∼100 ppm of NaCl can be obtained, and base/acid can be produced from the salts without any membrane fouling by dyes. Therefore, the hybrid loose NF-BMED process allows for resource (i.e., dye, salt and pure water) extraction from textile wastewater, which closes the salt and water cycle, in view of process intensification.

Membrane contactors have been proposed as an advanced tool for CO2 capture from flue gases by absorption in alkaline solutions. However, regeneration of the alkaline reagent and further CO2 sequestration are pending issues. In this paper, membrane-assisted crystallization is proposed for crystallizing Na2CO3, which allows its reuse, after CO2 absorption from flue gases. Due to the presence of compounds other than CO2 in flue gases (i.e., SO2, NO x ), other compounds (Na2SO4 and NaNO3) may interfere with Na2CO3 crystallization. This was evaluated by measuring the flux through the membrane and the morphology, crystallography, and purity of the crystals. Furthermore, the presence of NaCl possibly transferred from the osmotic solution to the feed solution was evaluated. The experimental results indicate that the presence of impurities decreases the flux through the membrane due to the decrease of water activity, although there is no influence on the overall mass transfer coefficient. The presence of Na2SO4 affected the morphology of the Na2CO3 crystals while NaNO3 and NaCl had no apparent effect on the crystalline products. It was confirmed that Na2CO3·10H2O was formed during the crystallization. Moreover, the purity of Na2CO3 crystals reaches up to ca. 99.5%. Membrane-assisted crystallization was concluded to be feasible in recovering CO2 as a carbonate salt, which can possibly be reused in the industry.