APPLICATION OF MEMBRANE SEPARATION PROCESSES IN

PETROCHEMICAL INDUSTRY
A resource-intensive industrial development, particularly in some Asian countries,
characterized the last century. Its main causes can be ascribed to the significant
elongation of life expectation, and to the overall increase in the standards
characterizing the quality of life. The drawback of these positive aspects is the
emergence of problems related to the industrial development: water stress, the
environmental pollution, and the increase of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere.
The need to achieve a knowledge-intensive industrial development is nowadays
well recognized. This will permit the transition from an industrial system based on
quantity to one based on quality in the framework of a sustainable development.
Membrane processes:
Transport through the membrane takes place when a driving force is applied to the
components in the feed. In most of the membrane processes, the driving force is a
pressure difference or concentration across the membrane.
Wastewater treatment and reuse
Considerable advances in MF, UF and NF technologies to recover municipal
wastewater have been also achieved. Also in this case, the implementation of
integrated membrane systems is growing rapidly with excellent results.
The main treatment steps to recover municipal wastewater from Kuwait City and
the surrounding area are reported: A conventional biological wastewater treatment
plant (WWTP) treats the effluent to better than secondary effluent quality. The
secondary effluent then flows to the water reclamation plant which uses UF and
RO to further treat the water for reuse. Sludge from the wastewater treatment plant
is treated to allow for disposal by landfill, incineration, or by composting.
Membrane filtration was selected to provide robust pretreatment of the secondarytreated municipal effluent before being fed to the RO. Membrane filtration was
chosen over conventional tertiary clarification and filtration because it reduced the
plant chemical consumption and could guarantee that low turbidity water is fed to
the RO.

In the membrane field, the term module is used to describe a complete unit
composed of the membranes, the pressure support structure, the feed inlet, the
outlet permeate and retentate streams, and an overall support structure. The
principal types of membrane modules are:

Tubular, where membranes are placed inside a support porous tubes, and
these tubes are placed together in a cylindrical shell to form the unit
module. Tubular devices are primarily used in micro and ultra filtration
applications because of their ability to handle process streams with high
solids and high viscosity properties, as well as for their relative ease of
cleaning.

Hollow fiber, consists of a bundle of hundreds to thousands of hollow

fibers. The entire assembly is inserted into a pressure vessel. The feed
can be applied to the inside of the fiber (inside-out flow) or the outside of
the fiber (outside-in flow).

Spiral Wound, where a flexible permeate spacer is placed between two

flat membranes sheet. A flexible feed spacer is added and the flat sheets
are rolled into a circular configuration.

Plate and frame consist of a series of flat membrane sheets and support
plates. The water to be treated passes between the membranes of two
adjacent membrane assemblies. The plate supports the membranes and
provides a channel for the permeate to flow out of the unit module.

Ceramic and polymeric Flat Sheet Membranes and modules. Flat sheet
membranes are typically built-into a submerged vacuum driven filtration
systems which consist of stacks of modules each with a number of
sheets. Filtration mode is outside-in where the water passes through the
membrane and is collected in permeate channels. Cleaning can be
performed by aeration, back wash and CIP.

Membrane process operation.

The key elements of any membrane process relate to the influence of the following
parameters on the overall permeate flux are:
1. The membrane permeability (k)
2. The operational driving force per unit membrane area (Trans Membrane
Pressure, TMP)
3. The fouling and subsequent cleaning of the membrane surface.
Dead-end and cross-flow operation modes
Two operation modes for membranes can be used. These modes are:

Dead end filtration where all the feed applied to the membrane passes through
it, obtaining a permeate. Since there is no concentrate stream, all the particles
are retained in the membrane. Raw feed-water is sometimes used to flush the
accumulated material from the membrane surface.[6]

Cross-flow filtration where the feed water is pumped with a cross flow
tangential to the membrane and a concentrate and permeate streams are
obtained. This model implies that for a flow of feed-water across the
membrane, only a fraction is converted to permeate product. This parameter is
termed conversion or recovery (S). The recovery will be reduced if the
permeate is further used for maintaining processes operation, usually for
membrane cleaning.

Schematic process of dead-end and cross-flow filtration

Filtration leads to an increase of the resistance against the flow. In the case of
dead-end filtration process, the resistance increases according to the thickness of
the cake formed on the membrane. As a consequence, the permeability (k) and the
flux rapidly decrease, proportionally to the solids concentration [1] and, thus,
requiring a periodic cleaning.
For cross-flow processes, the deposition of material will continue until the forces
of the binding cake to the membrane will be balanced by the forces of the fluid. At
this point, cross-flow filtration will reach a steady-state condition [2], and thus, the
flux will remain constant with time. Therefore, this configuration will demand less
periodic cleaning.

Sources.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Membrane
http://www.geafiltration.com/applications/industrial_applications.asp