Ultrafiltration plant

An ultrafiltration plant is required to treat 50m3/day of protein-containing waste stream. The waste contains 0.05% by weight of protein which has to be concentrated to 2% to allow recycling to the main process stream. The tubular membranes to be used are... 

Figure 6.20 Purchase price in 2003 US dollars for ultrafiltration plants as a function of plant capacity. Data of Rogers corrected for inflation [20]. Reprinted from Synthetic Membrane Processes, A.N. Rogers, Economics of the Application of Membrane Processes, p. 454, G. Belfort (ed.), Copyright 1984, with permission from Elsevier...

Beginning in about 1990, the first microfiltration/ultrafiltration plants were installed to treat municipal surface water supplies [14,15], The driver was implementation of an EPA surface water treatment rule requiring all utilities in the United... 

FIGURE 32 A nine-stage ultrafiltration plant concentrating whole milk from 8 to 40% total solids for cheesemaking. (APV Crepeco Inc.)... 

Viszlay, J. and Toth, S., Operational Experience with Pilot Ultrafiltration Plant, 1st Int. Seminar PWR Water Chemistry, Balatonfiired, Hungary, 1992. 

Characteristic Data on the Tubular Ultrafiltration Plant at the StoraEnso Nymolla Pulp Mill... 

The feed into this plant is the permeate of the ultrafiltration pilot plant, to which antisealant at a concentration of 16 g/m was added to modify the solubility point of the salts and to prevent their precipitation on the membrane. The ultrafiltration plant effluent has a conductivity of around 14,000 p,S/cm. 

The ultrafiltration plant is composed of seven blocks of membranes, each with a length of 4.2 m, a width of 3.1 m, and an approximate height of 2.2 m. The length of each module is 3000 mm with a mbe diameter of 210 mm and an area of 27 m, the internal diameter of the membranes being 8 mm. The number of modules per block is 14, so that the total membrane surface area installed is 2646 m. ... 

Abcor (now a division of Koch Industries) installed the first industrial ultrafiltration plant to recover electrocoat paint from automobile paint shop rinse water in 1969. Shortly afterwards, systems were installed in the food industry for protein separation from milk whey and for apple juice clarification. The separation of oil emulsions from effluent wastewaters has also become a significant application. The current ultrafiltration market is approximately US 200 million/ year, but because the market is very fragmented no individual end-use segment is more than US 10-30 million/year. In the chemical and refining industries, the principal application of ultrafiltration is the treatment of oily wastewater. 

Panglisch, S. Holy, A. et al. 2005. Transferring pilot experiments into the planning of Germany s largest two-stage ultrafiltration plant. Desalination 179 225-235. 

A typical batch ultrafiltration plant is represented in Figure 1. It consists of a processing tank, a feed pump, a circulation pump and a membrane unit with a number of modules in parallel. A permeate is obtained from the membranes while the retentate is recirculated until the desired concentration in the processing tank is reached. Then, a cleaning procedure is performed and the system is ready for the next batch. 

The optimal design and operation of an ultrafiltration plant can be formulated as a dynamic optimisation problem. With respect to the optimal design, the following parameters are determined ... 

As an illustrative example, the optimal design and operation of a protein ultrafiltration plant will be studied. The membrane modules considered are those manufactured by US... 

This work addresses the optimal design and operation of a batch protein ultrafiltration plant. The dynamic optimisation procedure adopted identifies simultaneously the optimal design parameters and operating policy of the installation. It should be emphasised that the approach can be directly applied to other ultrafiltration processes. This is the first work in which a formal dynamic optimisation methodology is applied to batch ultrafiltration. 

Very large waste water quantities develop with the desizing. There are efforts to recycle the sizes with simultaneous waste water cleaning and by thus achieving a reduction of waste water. This process can take place with ultrafiltration plants. 

The membrane processes are characterized by quite small flow channels in and through the modules. This means that adequate prefiltration must be employed, in order to ensure as long a life as possible for the final separation stage. It is not uncommon now to find, for example, an ultrafiltration plant (with its own inlet microfilters) being used as a prefilter for a reverse osmosis desalination plant, as illustrated in Figure 2.25. 

Detergent solutions at elevated temperatures and high pH values can be used to clean the ultrafiltration plant. 

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