Other Techniques Membrane Separations

Membrane separations are techniques used industrially for removal of solutes and emulsified substances from solutions by application of pressure onto a very thin layer of a substance with microscopic pores, known as a membrane. Membrane separation processes include reverse osmosis (RO), ultrafiltration (UF), microfiltration (MF), dialysis, electrodialaysis, gas 

Principle of reverse osmosis, (a) Osmotic flow, (b) osmotic equilibrium, and (c) reverse osmosis. 

Membrane separation processes operate in a continuous manner and so, unlike conventional filtration, the accumulated solids do not form a moist cake but, rather, dense slurry that is discharged like in centrifugation or hydrocyclone separation. This stream of concentrated solids is simply 

Modes of flow in filtration (a) dead-end flow as in conventional cake filtration, and (b) cross-flow as in membrane separations. 

The permeate pressure P3 is negligible as compared with the pressure gradient between feed and concentrate and, thus 

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Cellulose acetate Loeb-Sourirajan reverse osmosis membranes were introduced commercially in the 1960s. Since then, many other polymers have been made into asymmetric membranes in attempts to improve membrane properties. In the reverse osmosis area, these attempts have had limited success, the only significant example being Du Font s polyamide membrane. For gas separation and ultrafUtration, a number of membranes with useful properties have been made. However, the early work on asymmetric membranes has spawned numerous other techniques in which a microporous membrane is used as a support to carry another thin, dense separating layer. 

The most significant application of reverse osmosis has been in the field of desalination to produce drinking water. Other important apphcations include the treatment of industrial waste water, concentration of fruit juices, and concentration of weak solutions such as aqueous ethanol [3-6]. The rest of the chapter will focus almost entirely on semi-permeable membranes used for reverse osmosis based applications. We chose this focus in view of the importance of reverse osmosis as a rather efficient separation technique for separating a wide range of solutions, especially very dilute solutions—which are usually notoriously difficult to handle using conventional techniques such as distillation. 

The methods developed by EBC and others in the late 1990s using hydrocyclones and phase-inversion techniques may be sufficient for separation of the treated oil from the aqueous phase and biocatalyst. However, a cost analysis of such methods may be necessary to determine the economic feasibility. Recent work using hydrophobic membranes, magnetically separable immobilized biocatalysts and other techniques may provide alternate methods for separation of oil and recycling biocatalyst. A comparison of these techniques with each other and the previously investigated hydrocyclone techniques is needed to demonstrate improvements in the separation efficiency. 

Methods now used to separate (capture) COj from other gases include solvent techniques and membrane separations. Both methods require energy input to recover COj. More efficient, lower-cost separation techniques would improve the feasibility of CO2 capture. 

Naturally, there exist a variety of membrane separation processes depending on the particular separation task [1]. The successful introduction of a membrane process into the production line therefore relies on understanding the basic separation principles as well as on the knowledge of the application limits. As is the case with any other unit operation, the optimum configuration needs to be found in view of the overall production process, and combination with other separation techniques (hybrid processes) often proves advantageous for large-scale applications. 

Enzymes, when immobilized in spherical particles or in films made from various polymers and porous materials, are referred to as immobUized enzymes. Enzymes can be immobilized by covalent bonding, electrostatic interaction, crosslinking of the enzymes, and entrapment in a polymer network, among other techniques. In the case of batch reactors, the particles or films of immobilized enzymes can be reused after having been separated from the solution after reaction by physical means, such as sedimentation, centrifugation, and filtration. Immobilized enzymes can also be used in continuous fixed-bed reactors, fluidized reactors, and membrane reactors. 

Conditions sometimes exist that may make separations by distillation difficult or impractical or may require special techniques. Natural products such as petroleum or products derived from vegetable or animal matter are mixtures of very many chemically unidentified substances. Thermal instability sometimes is a problem. In other cases, vapor-liquid phase equilibria are unfavorable. It is true that distillations have been practiced successfully in some natural product industries, notably petroleum, long before a scientific basis was established, but the designs based on empirical rules are being improved by modern calculation techniques. Even unfavorable vapor-liquid equilibria sometimes can be ameliorated by changes of operating conditions or by chemical additives. Still, it must be recognized that there may be superior separation techniques in some cases, for instance, crystallization, liquid-liquid extraction, supercritical extraction, foam fractionation, dialysis, reverse osmosis, membrane separation, and others. The special distillations exemplified in this section are petroleum, azeotropic, extractive, and molecular distillations. 

The production by Loeb and Sourirajan of the first successful anisotropic membranes spawned numerous other techniques in which a microporous membrane is used as a support for a thin, dense separating layer. One of the most important of these was interfacial polymerization, an entirely new method of making anisotropic membranes developed by John Cadotte, then at North Star Research. Reverse osmosis membranes produced by this technique had dramatically improved salt rejections and water fluxes compared to those prepared by the Loeb-Souri-rajan process. Almost all reverse osmosis membranes are now made by the interfacial polymerization process, illustrated in Figure 3.20. In this method, an aqueous solution of a reactive prepolymer, such as a polyamine, is first deposited in the pores of a microporous support membrane, typically a polysul-fone ultrafiltration membrane. The amine-loaded support is then immersed in a water-immiscible solvent solution containing a reactant, such as a diacid chloride in hexane. The amine and acid chloride react at the interface of the two immiscible... 

Mixed Gas Plasmas. Water loading can be reduced by a desolvation system (condenser or membrane separator) only if the vast majority of the water can be removed. One way to eliminate the introduction of water into the plasma during measurement of the analyte signals is with electrothermal vaporization, laser ablation, or other direct solid sampling techniques. Mixed gas plasmas,... 

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