Experimental Investigation of Nanofiltration Process for the Separation of Complex Aqueous Electrolyte Mixtures

Abstract

The era of membrane technology began in 1960s as a viable alternative to the more conventional separation techniques (distillation, extraction and evaporation processes) and can carry out separations that are difficult by other means. For these reasons membranes are becoming increasingly important in food and dairy industries for a variety of desalting, purification, concentration and other separations. Most of the previous work done on NF process is at room temperature and low pressures. The novelty of this work lies in the high pressure and high temperature applications in connection with our previous work mentioned in the reference section. This work focuses on the experimental study of nanofiltration (NF) process for the separation of binary, ternary and quaternary aqueous mixtures of different salts at a starting concentration of 0.25 w% of each, whether single or in a mixture form. The experiments proved that NF process is capable of separating different ions from solution. The evaluation of the data revealed that the rejection of divalent cations and anions was greater than 96 % in most of the cases.