Water softening ultrafiltration

Micro-, ultra-, and nano-filtration can separate smaller particles using media with defined porous sizes (i.e., 10 1—1 pm in microfiltration, 10 2—10 pm in ultrafiltration, and 10 3— 10 2 pm in nanofiltration). Residual colloidal and suspended solids can be removed by microfiltration. Selected salts, most organic compounds, bacteria, protozoan cysts, oocysts and viruses are removed by nanofiltration, so that the treated water will be disinfected. This advanced filtration is used for the treatment of effluents for indirect potable reuse applications such as groundwater injection, water softening, decoloriza-tion, or removal of micropollution. 

After the break tank, process water is treated using various equipment and technologies depending on its intended use and the water analysis. Some of the technologies are multimedia filtration, water softening, activated carbon adsorption, UV treatment, deionization, ultrafiltration, reverse osmosis, final filtration and distillation. 

While reverse osmosis and ultrafiltration were being established in several applications, there was a lack of available membranes with cutoffs between 400 and 4000 g/mol. Increasing interest in NF membranes developed in the last decade. An extensive review on principles and applications of nanofiltration has been published recently [38]. Nanofiltration is important for water softening [39] and removal of organic contaminants. In the food industry, nanofiltration can be applied for concentration and demineralization of whey, concentration of sugar and juice. Nanofiltration also finds application in the pulp and paper industry, in the concentration of textile dye effluents and in landfill leachate treatment. The improvement of solvent stabihty of available NF membranes opens a wide range of potential applications in the chemical and pharmaceutical industry as weU as in metal and acid recovery. 

Nanohybrid materials have been furthermore used for ultra-/nanofiltration applications. Nanofiltration is a pressure-driven membrane separation process and can be used for the production of drinking water as well as for the treatment of process and waste waters. Some apphcations are desalination of brackish water, water softening, removal of micropollutants, and retention of dyes. Ultrafiltration membranes based on polysulfones filled with zirconia nanoparticles are usually prepared via a phase-inversion technique and have been used since 1990 [328]. Various studies were done in order to assess the effect of the addition of Zr02 to polysulfone-based ultrafiltration membranes [329] and the influence of filler loading on the compaction and filtration properties of membranes. The results indicate that the elastic strain of the nanohybrid membranes decreases and the time-dependent strain... 

Tabatabai, A., Scamehom, XF. Christian, S.D. (1995b) Economic feasibility study of polyelectrolyte-enhanced ultrafiltration (PEUF) for water softening. Journal of Membrane Science, 100 (3), 193-207. 

Whey concentration, both of whole whey and ultrafiltration permeate, is practiced successfully, but the solubility of lactose hmits the practical concentration of whey to about 20 percent total sohds, about a 4x concentration fac tor. (Membranes do not tolerate sohds forming on their surface.) Nanofiltration is used to soften water and clean up streams where complete removal of monovalent ions is either unnecessary or undesirable. Because of the ionic character of most NF membranes, they reject polyvalent ions much more readily than monovalent ions. NF is used to treat salt whey, the whey expressed after NaCl is added to curd. Nanofiltration permits the NaCl to permeate while retaining the other whey components, which may then be blended with ordinaiy whey. NF is also used to deacidify whey produced by the addition of HCl to milk in the production of casein. 

The individual membrane filtration processes are defined chiefly by pore size although there is some ovedap. The smallest membrane pore size is used in reverse osmosis (0.0005—0.002 microns), followed by nanofiltration (0.001—0.01 microns), ultrafiltration (0.002—0.1 microns), and micro filtration (0.1—1.0 microns). Klectrodialysis uses dectric current to transport ionic species across a membrane. Micro- and ultrafiltration rely on pore size for material separation, reverse osmosis on pore size and diffusion, and dectrodialysis on diffusion. Separation efficiency does not reach 100% for any of these membrane processes. For example, when used to desalinate—soften water for industrial processes, the concentrated salt stream (reject) from reverse osmosis can be 20% of the total flow. These concentrated, yet stiU dilute streams, may require additional treatment or special disposal methods. 

Nanofiltration (NF), also referred to as ultra-low-pressure reverse osmosis, was developed to fill the gap between reverse osmosis and ultrafiltration. In water purification, nanofiltration has been found to effectively remove selected salts to reduce total hardness at lower pressures than RO systems. The nanofiltration membrane employed for this apphcation has been referred to as a softening membrane. The softening membrane also effectively removes color and trihalomethane (THM) precursors. 

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