Modeling and experimental validation of direct contact membrane distillation applied to synthetic dye solutions

Abstract

BACKGROUND In order to protect water resources and reduce the harmful effects of releasing contaminated wastewater to the environment, the textile industry has increasingly demanded improved water reclamation technologies, such as membrane distillation. In this work, theoretical and experimental investigations were carried out to evaluate the behavior of the operational parameters of a direct contact membrane distillation (DCMD) setting with a commercial membrane applied to synthetic dye solutions, simulating textile wastewater from the fabric dyeing stage. RESULTS The analytical model based on heat and mass transfer correlations specific to textile effluents implemented using Matlab® predicted the permeate flux with good agreement, with errors less than 10% when compared with the experimental values. There was a different trend for reactive and disperse dyes when input variables were changed. In general, increasing all variables led to an increase in permeate flux. An increase of 30 °C in the feed temperature increased by 2.0‐ to 2.3‐fold the permeate flux. Moreover, the simulation showed the influence of the permeate temperature and the membrane interface temperature on the permeate flux, which is not commonly achieved experimentally. CONCLUSIONS The hybrid modeling supported by extensive experimental validation accurately predicted the permeate flux in DCMD to recover water from synthetic dye solutions containing reactive and disperse black dyes. DCMD is a promising technology for recovering textile wastewater containing these dyes, as it can use the waste heat from the hot effluent discharge. Therefore, this work can contribute towards the scaling up of DCMD, aiding in predicting and optimizing the operational variables. © 2020 Society of Chemical Industry (SCI)

Review of Transport Phenomena and Popular Modelling Approaches in Membrane Distillation

“…The error of the experimental validation of the conventional modelling is generally less than 10% [ 61 , 105 , 106 , 107 , 108 ], which has been used to estimate the membrane area and operation parameters for in the pilot tests [ 91 , 109 ].…”

High‐flux strategy for electrospun nanofibers in membrane distillation to treat aquaculture wastewater: a review

“…Therefore, it is more suitable for treating wastewater with high organic/inorganic content and high salinity, including aquaculture wastewater. The vapor pressure difference between both sides of the membrane serves as the driving force in MD, which is a thermally induced separation mechanism that uses a microporous hydrophobic membrane as the separation medium, 12,14 as schematically shown in Fig. 1.…”

Modelling mass transport within the membrane of direct contact membrane distillation modules used for desalination and wastewater treatment: Scrutinising assumptions

“…A DCMD module (in which the permeate stream was injected with 0.01 mol/litre sulphuric acid) was shown to remove ammonia, which is a common pollutant in industrial and municipal wastewater, with high efficiency (99.5%) [13]. Likewise, DCMD was proven to be successful treating low level radioactive wastewater [14] and textile wastewater containing synthetic dyes [15].…”

“…( 33) in [26]) to that of Hayer et al [25] to compute the transmembrane flux of water vapour. On the other hand, some investigators used experimentally determined coefficients that lump all the diffusive and convective flow effects when modelling the transmembrane flux of water vapour; this coefficient may be called intrinsic mass transfer coefficient [28], membrane distillation coefficient [5], membrane transfer coefficient [15] or simply permeability [16].…”