Abstract
Phenolic compounds and their derivatives are very common pollutants in wastewaters. Among the methods described for their removal, pressure‐driven membrane processes are considered as a reliable alternative. Our research group has previously studied phenol removal in reverse osmosis (RO) conditions and obtained very low rejection percentages. Subsequently, when low reverse osmosis (LRO) conditions were studied, the organic rejection percentages improved. To further our knowledge in this respect, the main objective of this work was to study the behaviour of the polyamide thin‐film composite membrane RO98pHt used for phenol removal in RO and LRO conditions. The influence of different operating pressures, phenol feed concentrations and pH on permeate flux and phenol rejection was studied. Low reverse osmosis conditions led to higher phenol rejection percentages in all the assayed conditions, suggesting that other factors related to the molecular characteristics of the organic molecules, such as solubility, acidity and hydrogen bonding capacity, play an important role in the rejection percentage attained. As expected, permeate flux was greater in RO conditions.
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