Ultrafiltration pretreatment

Figure 12.5 Scheme of three different drinking-water production plants traditional (A) using ultrafiltration pretreatment and spiral-wound nanofiltration (B) and using capillary nanofiltration (Q [17]. 

Reverse osmosis enables complete retention of aU dissolved compounds, even small monovalent ions. To avoid the membrane blocking and scaling before reverse osmosis, microfiltration, or ultrafiltration pretreatment can be applied. Apart from preliminary treatment, ultrafiltration can be used for separation of suspensions or colloids, which are often formed by actinides or ions such as " Mg, Fe, °Co, and Sb. Microfiltration found the application for waste dewatering after precipitation. Nanofiltration (NF) that uses lower pressures than reverse osmosis is applied for separation of bivalent from monovalent ions. The most common application of NF process in nuclear industry is boric acid separation from the reactor coolant. 

Laboratory and pilot plant experiments carried out at INCT showed that reverse osmosis is very useful for the treatment of liquid low-level radioactive wastes from Polish nuclear laboratories. However, to reach high decontamination the process should be arranged as a multistage operation with microfiltration or ultrafiltration pretreatment [32,33]. 

The possibility of pretreating the whey before membrane processing to reduce fouling may be commercially attractive, provided that the product properties, such as the functionality of the proteins, are not detrimentally affected. For whey ultrafiltration, pretreatment methods have been developed to remove the lipid fraction (19, 20) which involve flocculation and gravity settling. 

Municipal (sewage) reclamation. This is a growing application for RO with microfUtration or ultrafiltration pretreatment. Large-scale systems are now in operation in the western... 

Industrial waste reclamation. A very wide field, in many cases requiring microfiltration or ultrafiltration pretreatment to condition the water prior to the RO membrane. Piloting is often required due to the one-off nature of these streams. Some thought at the design stage for industrial plant may identify some waste streams that are easily treated for recycle— they should be kept separate from the difficult streams. 

TABLE 7.4 Process Design Conditions for Seawater Desalination with Media Filtration and Ultrafiltration Pretreatment... 

Ultrafiltration pretreatment positively protects an RO desalination system, and thus has the potential to increase plant availability and reliability. In addition, the analysis presented above shows that UF pretreatment offers the possibility to optimize the design and operation of RO systems to reduce total life-cycle cost below current practice. 

Ultrafiltration. Ultrafiltration was described under pretreatment methods. It is used to remove finely divided suspended solids, and when used as a tertiary treatment, it can remove virtually all the BOD remaining after secondary treatment. 

Fig. 23. Two types of hollow-fiber modules used for gas separation, reverse osmosis, and ultrafiltration applications, (a) Shell-side feed modules are generally used for high pressure appHcations up to - 7 MPa (1000 psig). Fouling on the feed side of the membrane can be a problem with this design, and pretreatment of the feed stream to remove particulates is required, (b) Bore-side feed modules are generally used for medium pressure feed streams up to - 1 MPa (150 psig), where good flow control to minimise fouling and concentration polarization on the feed side of the membrane is desired.

A second factor determining module selection is resistance to fouling. Membrane fouling is a particularly important problem in Hquid separations such as reverse osmosis and ultrafiltration. In gas separation appHcations, fouling is more easily controlled. Hollow-fine fibers are notoriously prone to fouling and can only be used in reverse osmosis appHcations if extensive, costiy feed-solution pretreatment is used to remove ah. particulates. These fibers caimot be used in ultrafiltration appHcations at ah. 

Fouling is controlled by selection of proper membrane materials, pretreatment of feed and membrane, and operating conditions. Control and removal of fouling films is essential for industrial ultrafiltration processes. 

Pretreatment For most membrane applications, particularly for RO and NF, pretreatment of the feed is essential. If pretreatment is inadequate, success will be transient. For most applications, pretreatment is location specific. Well water is easier to treat than surface water and that is particularly true for sea wells. A reducing (anaerobic) environment is preferred. If heavy metals are present in the feed even in small amounts, they may catalyze membrane degradation. If surface sources are treated, chlorination followed by thorough dechlorination is required for high-performance membranes [Riley in Baker et al., op. cit., p. 5-29]. It is normal to adjust pH and add antisealants to prevent deposition of carbonates and siillates on the membrane. Iron can be a major problem, and equipment selection to avoid iron contamination is required. Freshly precipitated iron oxide fouls membranes and reqiiires an expensive cleaning procedure to remove. Humic acid is another foulant, and if it is present, conventional flocculation and filtration are normally used to remove it. The same treatment is appropriate for other colloidal materials. Ultrafiltration or microfiltration are excellent pretreatments, but in general they are... 

Two other major factors determining module selection are concentration polarisation control and resistance to fouling. Concentration polarisation control is a particularly important issue in liquid separations such as reverse osmosis and ultrafiltration. Hollow-fine-fibre modules are notoriously prone to fouling and concentration polarisation and can be used in reverse osmosis applications only when extensive, costly feed solution pretreatment removes all particulates. These fibres cannot be used in ultrafiltration applications at all. 

Ultrafiltration is particularly useful as a pretreatment roughing filter for the type of ion-exchange resin beds and EDR technologies... 

Treatment with iron chelators and a-tocopherol protect against lipid p>eroxidation and hepatocellular injury in iron-overloaded rats (Sharma etal., 1990). When hepatocytes are isolated from rats, which have been pretreated with a-tocopherol, there is a significant reduction in iron-induced lipid peroxidation and improvement in cell viability in vitro (Poli et al., 1985). Similar effects were seen when hepatocytes were incubated with iron chelators (Bacon and Britton, 1990). Treatment of moderately, but not heavily, iron-loaded rats with desferrioxamine in vivo inhibits the pro-oxidant activity of hepatic ultrafiltrates (Britton et al., 1990b). 

The thermodynamic approach does not make explicit the effects of concentration at the membrane. A good deal of the analysis of concentration polarisation given for ultrafiltration also applies to reverse osmosis. The control of the boundary layer is just as important. The main effects of concentration polarisation in this case are, however, a reduced value of solvent permeation rate as a result of an increased osmotic pressure at the membrane surface given in equation 8.37, and a decrease in solute rejection given in equation 8.38. In many applications it is usual to pretreat feeds in order to remove colloidal material before reverse osmosis. The components which must then be retained by reverse osmosis have higher diffusion coefficients than those encountered in ultrafiltration. Hence, the polarisation modulus given in equation 8.14 is lower, and the concentration of solutes at the membrane seldom results in the formation of a gel. For the case of turbulent flow the Dittus-Boelter correlation may be used, as was the case for ultrafiltration giving a polarisation modulus of ... 

Microfiltration (MF) and ultrafiltration (UF) membranes can be used as forms of pretreatment for nanofiltration (ISIF) or reverse osmosis (RO) desalination processes. Membrane pretreatment reduces the amount of chemicals that are required and hence reduces the environmental impact of the final discharge. MF membranes can be used to filter particles with diameters of 0.1-10 pmm and typically remove bacteria, viruses, precipitates, coagulates and large colloidal particles. UF can remove particles with diameters as small as 0.002 pm, and... 

Colloidal materials present in surface waters can also plug RO membranes, causing a decrease in permeate flux. Colloidal plugging can be avoided by using one of several possible pretreatment steps. Ultrafiltration (qv) (UF) or microfiltration (MF), depending on the size of the colloid, can be used to filter out the colloidal material. Alternatively, a coagulant such as alum can be added to the water to form aggregates of the colloid, which can then be filtered in a similar manner as suspended solids. 

Prior to analysis of -lactam residues in liquid foods such as milk, a pretreatment step for fat removal, accomplished by centrifugation (69-71), is usually required. In instances where milk is to be submitted to ultrafiltration, dilution with water/acetonitrile (72-76) or water/acetonitrile/methanol (77-79) is often needed. Milk filtration (80) or dilution with acetate (81, 82) or phosphate buffers (83) is sometimes essential prior to solid-phase extraction. Unlike milk, semisolid food samples such as muscle, kidney, and liver require normally more intensive sample pretreatment. Tissue break-up is mostly carried out by the combined use of a mincing apparatus and a tissue homogenizer. 

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