Industrial wastewater treatment using conventional treatment technologies is becoming challenging day-by-day due to presence of ‘newer’ refractory compounds, lower treatment efficiencies and stricter environmental laws. Combination of conventional treatment techniques with modern treatment technologies like membrane filtration or advanced oxidation processes (AOPs) has shown promise in achieving high efficiencies. In this work we have worked towards development of a membrane nanofiltration unit to treat coagulation-flocculation pretreated IWW from a specialized treatment facility. More specifically, state-of-the-art TiO2 ceramic NF membranes with low molecular weight cut off (MWCO) (200, 450, 750, 8500 Da) purchased from Inopor Gmbh were tested on 6 different IWW samples due to their superior chemical stability, higher flux and high fouling resistance along with 3 commercial polymer NF membranes (NF90, NFX, NFS) for comparison purposes. Additionally, wastewater characterization dataset including composition analysis using Gas-chromatography Mass-spectroscopy (GC-MS) is leveraged to build data driven models for membrane performance prediction. ‘200 Da’ ceramic NF membrane was able to reject significant COD with an average rejection of 77% and 60% for two IWW samples with permeate flux between 5-15 LMH at 100-120 psi trans-membrane pressure (TMP). ‘200-Da’ membrane was also found to achieve more flux than ‘450 Da’ membrane while rejecting more COD at the same time. ‘200 Da’ membrane also showed lower flux decline than polymer membranes. Additionally, the ceramic NF membranes were found to be easily chemically cleanable restoring wastewater flux after fouling. Since polymer NF membranes were found to reject at higher COD rejection efficiencies (60-90%) and permeate flux, further improvement in ceramic membranes is needed to treat at higher efficiencies. 200 Da, NF90 and NFX membranes were found to be promising to reduce COD below target (600 mg/L) and should be studied further for this application. / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc) / Conventional technologies for Industrial wastewater (IWW) treatment include biological treatment, coagulation, flocculation, adsorption and filtration. Many industries produce IWW with high concentration of biologically toxic organics ruling out the option of biological treatment. Moreover, with stricter regulatory laws in place for effluent discharge, adoption of new treatment technologies is needed. Nanofiltration (NF) is one such treatment technology that has seen a lot of growth in the past decade since its advent in 1980s. Polymer nanofiltration has been successfully used in applications such as dye removal in textile industry, as a pre-treatment method in desalination plants, for organic solvent nanofiltration in pharmaceutical industry and many more. More recent development of ceramic nanofiltration membranes has seen a lot of interest from researchers around the world due to their superior physical and chemical robustness, fouling resistant properties and higher permeability as compared to polymer NF membranes, though only a small amount of ceramic NF membranes are applied in industrial projects. To this end, we have conducted laboratory scale testing of 4 state of the art ceramic NF membranes on multiple real industrial wastewater samples collected from a specialized IWW treatment plant, along with 3 polymer NF membranes for comparison purposes. Additionally, a data-driven modeling approach leveraging the wastewater composition dataset is shown. The models can be used to predict % rejection of an unseen compound based on its chemical properties and provide insights into complex interactions between compounds and the membrane.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/25947 |
| Date | January 2020 |
| Creators | Agnihotri, Satyam |
| Contributors | Latulippe, David, Mhaskar, Prashant, Chemical Engineering |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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