Journal of Chromatography & Separation Techniques
Open Access

Scale-up of zeolite membranes for water treatment

2^nd International Conference and Expo on Separation Techniques

September 26-28, 2016 Valencia, Spain

C Algieri

University of Calabria, Italy

Posters & Accepted Abstracts: J Chromatogr Sep Tech

Abstract :

In the last years, desalination of sea- and brackish water to obtain sweet water in arid regions has gained a growing interest. In this context, membrane distillation (MD) is able to efficiently treat high concentrated brines allow increasing the overall fresh water production. Studies on MD were often made by using polymeric membranes. However, these membranes present fouling problems and also degrade when they are exposed to aggressive environments. Therefore, great attention was directed towards inorganic membranes owing to their high mechanical and chemical stability and the possibility to re-use them numerous times. In the class of inorganic membranes, zeolite membranes present another important characteristic useful in membrane process that is the pore size control. In fact, they are able to separate continuously mixtures of substances on the basis of differences in molecular size, shape and also on the basis of different adsorption properties. However, processing problems and high cost hinder their industrial application. For desalination purposes, the MFI zeolite topology is appropriate having a pore size (about 5.5 Ã?Â?) lower than the major kinetic diameters of different hydrated ions. In this work, for the first time, tubular silicalite (MFI) membranes with a length of 30 cm were prepared using the secondary growth method coupled with the cross flow seeding procedure. Afterward, the prepared membranes were characterized and tested in vacuum membrane distillation process using both deionized water and NaCl solutions at different concentrations. The obtained results showed that it is possible to reach a good reproducibility in the preparation of uncalcined defect-free membranes. In addition, the prepared membranes showed the best performance leading to interesting fluxes and salt rejection values for feed salt concentrations in the range of 0.2 M-0.9 M.

Biography :

Email: c.algieri@itm.cnr.it