Temperature effect on ultrasonic monitoring during a filtration procedure

Abstract

Membranes are used extensively for a wide variety of commercial separation applications including those in the water purification, pharmaceutical, and food processing industries. Fouling is a major problem associated with membrane-based liquid separation processes because it can often severely limit process performance. The use of ultrasonic monitoring technique for the characterization of membranes and membrane processes has been widely used by university researchers and industrial groups for a variety of applications including membrane fouling, compaction, formation, defect detection, and morphology characterization. However, during the industrial application, such as desalination procedure, temperature of the feed liquid is not constant. This change of the temperature brings in the concern that whether the change of the ultrasonic signal is caused by the fouling or by the temperature change. This research is focus on to verify the degree of effect of temperature to ultrasonic signal, and provide a method that calibrate the temperature effect for real applications.