Flat-Sheet Membranes and Spiral-Wound Modules

3 Flat-Sheet Membranes and Spiral-Wound Modules 

Flat-sheet membranes are made in continuous rolls 500-5000 m long. Sheets of membrane 1-2 m long are cut and folded and then packaged as spiral-wound module envelopes. A single module may contain as many as thirty membrane envelopes. Currently, the industry standard spiral-wound module is 8 inches (1 inch = 2.54 cm) in diameter and about 35-40 inches long it contains 20-40 m2 of membrane. 

Each membrane/module type has advantages and disadvantages [2,7]. Hollow fine fibers are generally the cheapest on a per-square-meter basis, but it is harder to make very thin selective membrane layers in hollow-fiber form than in flat-sheet form. This means the permeances of hollow fibers are usually lower than flat-sheet membranes made from the same material. Also, hollow fine fiber modules require more pretreatment of the feed to remove particulates, oil mist and other fouling components than is usually required by capillary or spiral-wound modules. These factors offset some of the cost advantage of the hollow fine fiber design. 

The investment in time and equipment to develop a new membrane material in a high-performance hollow fine fiber or capillary form is far larger than that required to develop flat-sheet membranes, and many materials cannot be formed into fiber modules at all. For this reason, flat-sheet membranes, formed into spiral-wound modules, are used in many niche applications which cannot support the development costs associated with fiber modules. Spiral-wound modules are also competitive in the natural-gas processing area, where their general robustness is an asset. 

In the early days of gas separation, the average membrane module was just a few inches in diameter. In recent years, the trend has been to obtain economies of scale by 

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