Treatment of dairy wastewater with tubular ceramic membrane

Abstract

This work illustrates the fabrication of tubular ceramic membrane with extrusion machine using low cost clay materials such as kaolin, quartz, CaCO3, boric acid, feldspar and carboxymethyl cellulose. The raw membrane was kept at ambient temperature for 24 hrs. It is sintered at 950 °C at a heating rate of 0.5 °C per minutes for 6 hrs in stepwise muffle furnace. The fabricated membrane is characterized with pure water permeability and porosity measurement. The pore size of 1.49 µm and permeability of 5.438 × 10−8 m/s.kPa are obtained from pure water permeability test. The tubular membrane was tested for dairy wastewater at different pressure (13.79–55.16 kPa) on a microfiltration range. With increase in the applied pressure the removal rate of chemical oxygen demand (COD) decreases showing optimum removal of 52.08 % at a low pressure of 13.08 kPa. Along with the COD determination, various parameters of the dairy wastewater were also measured like pH, conductivity and turbidity. The obtained pH, conductivity and turbidity of feed are 7.11, 2 mS/cm and 45 NTU respectively. Moreover, the prepared tubular membrane was examined for the fouling mechanism using four conventional pore blocking models.