Mass Transfer in Tubular Ceramic Membranes for Polluted Water Treatment - Numerical Simulation

Abstract

Innovative technologies are needed to attend the increasingly strict requirements for produced water treatment, since most of the separation processes are limited to particles larger than 10 μm. Separation processes using ceramic membranes are attracting great interest from academic and industrial community. Nevertheless, few studies, especially numerical, regarding the inorganic membrane’s application for the polluted water separation have been reported. In the present work, therefore, a study of fluid-flow dynamics for a laminar regime in porous tubes (tubular porous ceramic membrane) has been performed. The mass, momentum and mass transport conservation equations were solved with the aid of a structured mesh using ANSYS CFX commercial package. The velocity of local permeation was determined using the resistance in series model. The specific resistance of the polarized layer was obtained by Carman-Kozeny equation. The numerical results were evaluated and compared with the results available in the literature, where by a good agreement with each other was found. The numerical results, obtained by the proposed shell and tubular membrane separation module, indicate that there is facilitation of mass transfer and hence a reduction in the thickness of the polarized boundary layer occurs.

Impact of the Polarization Layer on the Hydrodynamics and Mechanical Performance of a Filtering Hydrocyclone Applied to Oily Water Separation

“…Halim et al [6] comment that the membrane pore size can be adjusted to sizes smaller than 1 µm, thus ensuring the complete removal of oil droplets, even in oil/water emulsion. In the literature, several works that investigate the formation of the concentration polarization layer in a porous ceramic membrane using computational fluid dynamics can be found [7][8][9][10]. In these researches, emphasis is given to the importance of this computational tool in the process analysis.…”