Study of long term fouling on cross flow ultrafiltration

Abstract

Ultrafiltration (UF) is a membrane technique whereby water and microsolutes are separated from macromolecules. It has several applications in wastewater treatment and it is also widely used in chemical and food industries. The main disadvantage of UF is membrane fouling, which causes a decline in permeate flux with time. As permeate flux decline highly increases the operation costs, the time-dependence of permeate flux has been studied in many occasions. Most of these studies use protein aqueous solutions (bovine serum albumin, hemoglobin, cheese whey among others) as feed. However, as proteins are charged molecules, they interact with the membrane and their interactions are influenced by the pH of the solution, so the models applied to these kinds of feed solutions should include membrane-solute interaction. When using polythylene glycol (PEG) these interactions may not be considered and the models are simplified.