Insights into membrane distillation application for textile wastewater treatment – A review

Textile wastewater must be effectively treated with the best available technology prior to release to receiving water bodies to prevent its impact on the environment. Apparently, membrane distillation shows great potential in treating textile wastewater a part of the complexity of the textile wastewater composition. This membrane process enables the water vapour to pass through its porous hydrophobic membrane and retains the concentrated pollutants to be transported. This paper provides data and information from previous studies using membrane distillation to treat textile wastewater. An overview of the development of membrane distillation as well as the fundamental theory is presented. Recent progress in the application of membrane distillation in textile wastewater is then discussed. The final part of the paper looked at the future orientation of this technology to be acceptable in the industrial sector, especially for the textile industry

Industrial application of membrane distillation technology using palm oil mill effluent in Malaysia

The palm oil industry plays a vital role in the nation's economy. Regardless of the high revenue generated, the main problem in the palm oil industry is its substantial amount of wastes including empty fruit bunches, oil palm trunks and in particular palm oil mill effluent (POME) which can be harmful to the environment if discharged without being treated. The objective of this work is to introduce advanced wastewater treatment technology, which is membrane distillation (MD) technology for the effluent treatment system. PVDF hollow fibre membranes were fabricated via wet spinning technique and characterized using Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) and contact angle goniometer. The fabricated membranes were then tested in direct contact membrane distillation (DCMD) system using anaerobic POME as the feed solution. The effluent was analyzed before and after treatment with DCMD. The parameters included biological oxygen demand (BOD), chemical oxygen demand (COD), ammonia nitrogen (AN), nitrate-nitrogen (NN), total suspended solids (TSS), total dissolved solids (TDS), colour and turbidity. A preliminary test was carried out using distilled water before continuing with anaerobic POME as a feed solution. The average permeate flux obtained by the PVDF membrane is 2.509 kg/m2.hr with slight flux decline that is probably due to the attachment of biological compounds on the membrane pores. It was found that at least 90% rejection was obtained for almost all water quality parameters tested with the values were all lower than that of the standard set by the local authority. In a conclusion, it can be said that MD demonstrated excellent performance in treating palm oil wastewater to produce water of high quality

Fabrication and performance evaluation of Integrated Solar Driven Membrane Distillation System with Serpentine-shape of Flat Plate Solar Collector for Seawater Desalination

Solar-powered membrane distillation (SPMD) system has gained its popularity in desalination application for past decade credit to the system efficiency in producing pure water and the utilization of renewable energy. However, most of the past SPMD works used commercial solar thermal collector (STC) as the thermal energy supply to the feed solution and the study only focused on the performance of the system in terms of flux and salt rejection. In this work, a self-made flat plate solar collector (FPSC) with the serpentine-shape pipe was designed and fabricated to study the effect of the STC towards the membrane performance. Before testing, a simulation work of the fluid flow inside the serpentine-shape pipe of the FPSC was analyzed using NX 10.0 computer-aided design simulation. After that, the efficiency of the self-made FPSC system was tested directly to sunlight in order to identify the maximum irradiance and the temperature of the feed solution. Due to the fluctuation of solar irradiance, the experimental setup of the SPMD system was tested using a solar simulator, and the performance was compared with the membrane distillation (MD) system without integration with FPSC system. Based on the simulation data, it can be concluded that the heat losses across the pipe are due to the slower fluid velocity and sudden pressure drop, which attributed to centripetal force and pressure differences. Meanwhile, the outdoor evaluation data showed that the temperatures of collector and water inside the feed tank could reach up to 84°C and 64°C, respectively when the maximum irradiance of 938 W/m2 was applied. For the performance evaluation between with and without the self-made FPSC system, it can be seen that only marginal difference can be observed for the permeate flux and salt rejection with an average difference of 6.06% and 1.29%, respectively