Author(s)

Adriana Barbosa da Costa Pereira¹, Hortência Luma Fernandes Magalhães¹, Leonardo Pereira de Lucena Silva², Cristiane Arcoverde Passos³, Ricardo Soares Gomez⁴, Balbina Raquel de Brito Correia⁴, Severino Rodrigues de Farias Neto¹, Antonio Gilson Barbosa de Lima⁴

¹Department of Chemical Engineering, Federal University of Campina Grande, Campina Grande, Brazil.
²Department of Industry, Federal Institute of Paraiba, Cajazeiras, Brazil.
³Department of Chemical Engineering, Federal University of Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil.
⁴Department of Mechanical Engineering, Federal University of Campina Grande, Campina Grande, Brazil.

The separation process of oily water using membranes has attracted the attention of researchers and engineers. The greater problem in the use of membrane separation process is the reduction in permeate flux due to clogged pores by oil deposition inside the membrane or by the effect of the concentration polarization. For this purpose, a theoretical study of a water/oil separation module was performed. This device consists of a tubular ceramic membrane provided with a rectangular inlet section. Numerical simulations were performed using Ansys CFX software to solve the mass and momentum conservation equations in the fluid and porous domains. Here was adopted the RNG k-ε turbulence model. The effect of the membrane porosity and the inlet velocity of the fluid mixture on the two-phase flow behavior inside the separation module were evaluated. Results of the volumetric fraction, velocity and pressure fields of the oil and water phases are presented and analyzed. The results indicate a higher oil concentration within the membrane for the cases of higher porosity, and that the inlet fluid mixture velocity does not substantially affect the velocity profile within the separation module. It is found that the maximum separation efficiency of the module was obtained with feed velocity of 40 m/s and membrane porosity of 0.44.

Ceramic Membranes, Separation Process, Computational Fluid Dynamics, CFX

da Costa Pereira, A. , Magalhães, H. , de Lucena Silva, L. , Passos, C. , Soares Gomez, R. , de Brito Correia, B. , de Farias Neto, S. and de Lima, A. (2021) Oily Water Treatment by Ceramic Membrane: Modeling and Simulation. Open Journal of Fluid Dynamics, 11, 1-19. doi: 10.4236/ojfd.2021.111001.