Electrically Driven Molecule Transport within a Series of Ionomers and Improvement of Electrodialysis Process

Abstract

Electrodialysis (ED) is a separation technique for ionic solutions through an electrochemical membrane that has been used in industry for several decades. ED process can significantly change the features of conventional processes and have great advantage in the recovery of resources, the control of pollutants, and the chemical processing because of the simple process, high efficiency, and low disposal of wastes. It can be used in the separation and concentration of salts, acids and bases from aqueous solutions, the separation of monovalent ions from multivalent ions and the separation of ionic compounds from uncharged molecules. It can be used for either electrolyte reduction in feed streams or recovery of ions from dilute streams. Industrial applications encompass several industries and include the desalination, amino acids from protein hydrolysates, salts, acids, and alkali from industrial rinse waters, fruit juice deacidification, sugar and molasses desalting and blood plasma protein recovery. In our study, we analyze the process of ion flow through the anion exchange membrane, AEM (PC-SA) and cation exchange membrane, CEM (PC-SK) (provided by PCCell Corp.) and poly[t-butyl styrene-b-hydrogenated isoprene-b-sulfonated styrene-b-hydrogenated isoprene- b-t-butyl styrene) (tBS-HI-S-HI-tBS), Penta Block Copolymer, (PBC)(provided by Kraton Polymers LLC, Houston, TX and used to replace PC-SA). Comparing the power consumption of commercial polymers and PBC, it is significantly accepted that PBC is a kind of novel, low energy consuming, and less time requiring ionomer in the process of ED with great chemical and physical properties.