Renewable Energy iDriven low cost .membrane for water purification and Reclamation

Abstract

Industrial wastewater is the aqueous discard that results from substances having been dissolved or suspended in water, typically during the use of water in an industrial manufacturing process or the cleaning activities that take place along with that process. The wastewater treatment describes the processes used for treating wastewater that is produced by industries as an undesirable by-product. After treatment, the treated industrial wastewater may be reused or released to a sanitary sewer or to a surface water in the environment. Inorganic effluents are produced from various industries, including textile, electroplating, paints and stainless-steel manufacturing which leads to alarming the concern to the environmental issues. These inorganic micro-pollutants are generally toxic and non-biodegradable in the environment. The majority of the inorganic micro-pollutants consist of metal ion carrying charge and this fact can be used to separate them using membranes with comparatively bigger pore size and having charge on their surface. In fact, the development of nanofiltration membranes has improved the economy of the process because they perform comparable separation at much lower pressure as compared to the reverse osmosis membranes. Therefore, the necessity of obtaining higher performance with lower cost lead to development of charged membranes for ultrafiltration to separate metal ions from industrial effluents. These membranes are gaining popularity in wastewater treatment due to their capability for electrostatic interactions between a charged membrane and metal ions, even when wide pore membranes are used. Solar energy is also being use to minimize the cost in some cases. Sunlight may provide heat for evaporative desalination processes, or for some indirect methods, convert to electricity to power a membrane process. Solar derivatives have been studied and, in some cases, implemented in small and medium scale plants around the world. Production data shows that MSF solar distillation has an output capacity of 6-60 L/m2/day versus the 3-4 L/m2/day standard output of a solar still which is why it is one of the major sources of energy to treatment of the wastewater for pure water production. Ceramic membranes have been exploited in different fields. However, in the development of these ceramic membranes, expensive commercial ceramic supports such as, alumina, Titania and zirconia are used, contributing significantly to cost of production of these membranes. Despite this shortcoming, ceramic membranes, employed as UF membranes, have been extensively used for concentrating and purifying macromolecular species in aqueous solutions. Especially, membranes with single or multiple separative layers are made by depositing the active layers on microporous supports resulting in asymmetric membrane materials with varied pore size. The present study describes the preparation, characterization and performance evaluation of three different types of ceramic membranes prepared using low cost material as support including utilization of renewable energy for the water treatment and reclamation. These fabricated membranes were employed to treat two effluent discharges from the industry and other possibility will also explored.