Membrane separation technology spiral wound module

Composite membranes are made in sheets or rolls and fabricated into large-membrane-area membrane modules for use in industrial systems. GKSS, the main European suppher of vapor—gas separation units, packages its membranes into plate-and-fiame modules. Membrane Technology and Research, Inc. (MTR, Menlo Park, CA) the main U.S. producer, uses spiral-wound modules. 

Hollow-fibre membrane modules are similar to the capillary type described above, but with fibres of outside diameters ranging from 80 to 500 pm. It is usual to pack a hollow-fibre module with many hundreds or thousands of these fibres, thus membrane area per unit volume is extremely hi. It should be apparent that filtration using hollow-fibre modules is only realistic with process fluids prefiltered to prevent fibre blockage fins limits the technology and it is applied mainly in UF. Also used in uhrafiltration is a spiral-wound membrane module which is often compared to a Swiss roD. The membrane and a spacer are wound round a former, with an appropriate permeate spacer flow is introduced and removed from the ends. This module design is not appropriate for solid-liquid separation, even when filtering colloids, because of the possibility of flow channel blockage and so it will not be discussed any finther. 

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