Cleaning

Scaling and fouling of membranes are an on-going performance issue for most plants This presentation outlines innovations in speciality chemicals designed to inhibit membrane scaling and fouling and to clean membranes where deposition has occurred. There is an increasing trend to treat recycled wast

Multi-photon microscopy, a fluorescence based technique, was used to image in-situ the fouling and cleaning of a 0.22 µm microfiltration membrane fouled by bovine serum albumin and ovalbumin. Imaging of the cleaning was possible for two of the three cleaning regimes used. The free chlorine cleaner b

Ultrafiltration membranes are used extensively in dairy industry. The formation of fouling deposits during processing of dairy fluids has a significant impact on the performance of these membranes. In the current study, performance of a 30 kDa membrane has been investigated which is used to process

Characterisation of membranes in order to determine how clean the membranes are is usually determined by (1) comparing the initial and final clean water flux (2) the product flux in the following run, (3) FTIR analysis, (4) streaming potential and (5) contact angles. However, these techniques do not

The objective of this paper is to characterise and locate the thin layer of irreversible fouling in a spiral-wound membrane of ultrafiltration of acid whey, after 8000 h of production in a French dairy. Several physico-chemical techniques as SEM-EDX, SEM-FEG, FTIR-ATR and AFM were used. Fouling was

A membranes hydrophobicity, surface roughness and charge can all affect its tendency to foul and its subsequent cleanability. In this study polysulphone (PSf), polyethersulphone (PES) and regenerated cellulose (RC) ultrafiltration (UF) membranes were fouled with spent sulphite liquor (SSL) and clean

A contributor to success in managing membrane operations is to be able to identify suitable engineering design approaches to slow down the membrane fouling rate. Two such approaches were discussed in this study, namely: (1) off- site chemical and mechanical cleaning, and (2) air scouring. A longer s

Membrane surface characterization was studied by contact angles using both a goniometer and a tensiometer. It was checked that static and dynamic advancing contact angles of ultrafiltration membranes with water were in very good agreement. For glycerol and α-bromonaphthalene, dynamic advancing conta

Direct visual observation (DVO) was used to view membrane surfaces at different times in crossflow microfiltration of yeast suspensions with rapid backpulsing at varied backpulsing duration and pressure. The DVO photos show that the membranes are more effectively cleaned by longer backpulse duration

The cleaning of an ultrafiltration polyethersulfone (PES) membrane fouled by skimmed milk was studied by ATR–FTIR showing the functional groups of fouling species and EDX coupled with SEM measuring the atomic composition. Two kinds of fouling conditions were studied: further so-called “static condit