Effect of Flowrate and Pressure on the Crossflow Filtration in Textile Wastewater Treatment by Commercial UF Membrane

Abstract

Textile industries are one of the greatest wastewater producers as they require a significant amount of water to be used in the dyeing and finishing processes of textile manufacturing. The number of unit operations in the technological process, the product range, the bath ratio, the mass of fiber in relation to the bath volume, and the finishing machine are some variables that will affect water consumption in the textile industry. As a result, generally, a typical textile plant may consume a volume of water between 100,000 and 300,000 m3 annually. As textiles address a substantial portion of human requirements, it is predicted that by 2050, there will be 160 million metric tonnes, three times as much clothing as there is today. Membrane technology in wastewater treatment is a recent interest arising technique and garnering the industrial application’s interest, owing to its ease of setup and low energy requirement. Crossflow membrane filtration is commonly used in the industry, attributed to its tangential flow across the membrane mechanism, leading to low fouling. This study investigated the textile wastewater’s effluents using crossflow ultrafiltration (UF) membrane filtration. The effect of the operating parameter in terms of pressure and flowrate of the crossflow system were performed to evaluate it permeate flux performance. The study’s outcome reveals pressure increases from 2 bar to 4 bar, the water flux enhances dramatically from 156.26 L/m2hr to 591.98 L/m2hr, and the water flux further increases constantly from 4 bar to 10 bar. On the other hand, the flowrate positively affects the permeate flux, where the flux was enhanced from 651.01 L/m2hr to 726.08 L/m2hr when adjusting the flow rate from 2 LPM to 6 LPM. The results from this study suggested that crossflow membrane filtration system could be commercially feasible due to its permeate flux performance.