Flux enhancement by glass balls inserted into a membrane module

Abstract

The glass ball inserted membrane module presented in this study is designed to enhance filtration in a flat sheet membrane, Three different modes of filtration experiments were conducted and compared to demonstrate flux enhancement due to the presence of glass balls: a normal dead-end filtration, a vortex flow filtration, and an enhanced vortex flow filtration using glass balls. In the case of enhanced vortex flow filtration the permeate flux was found to be three times as large as that of the dead-end filtration, and two times larger compared with the vortex flow filtration. In addition, the flux decline was observed to be relatively low. The effect of the amount of glass balls on the permeate flux was also investigated by changing the values of glass ball volume fraction from 0.059 to 0.356. It has been observed that the permeate flux shows a maximum value of the volume fraction of 0.119. For the glass ball inserted membrane module, the permeate flux tends to increase with the feed flow rate.