Simulation of Membrane process to removal of volatile organic compounds from wastewater using Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD)

Abstract

One of the most important sources of volatile organic compounds is chemical solvent manufacturing. In addition to causing a lot of pollution to the environment, these organic materials are also economically harmful due to waste. For this reason, removing organic matter from industrial water or wastewater, as well as retrieving them, is an important issue. In this paper, the simulation of the process of separating volatile organic material from water by using nano-fiber membrane has been investigated. COMSOL Multiphysics software was used for numerical simulation of the system. By simulating in different conditions, it is possible to evaluate the performance of a membrane process in the removal of various pollutants. Finally, in order to evaluate the accuracy of the results of the simulation, the results of laboratory experiments by Feng et al. Were used. The simulation results show that after five hours, the concentration of chloroform at 60 ° C was reduced from 1157 to 400 ppm. At 23 ° C, the amount of organic matter lost from 1347 to 1080 ppm. The difference in gradient variations in these two temperatures is mainly due to the change in the Henry coefficient in the VLE, which increases with increasing temperature and improves the chlorophyll penetration inside the membrane and consequently improves its removal rate. Comparing the variations in the concentration of feed inside the tank at these two temperatures indicates that the simulations are very suitable for laboratory simulations with a relative difference of 11%.

Keywords

• volatile organic compounds
• chloroform
• membrane gas stripping
• computational fluid dynamic