Performance evaluation of tubular ceramic membrane for palm oil mill effluent treatment
Palm oil industry is one of the most important agriculture sectors in Malaysia. However, this industry produces a huge amount of palm oil mill effluent (POME) which contains impurities that will pollute the environment. Hence, POME has to be treated before it can be safely discharged to the envi...
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
2020
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| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/17138/1/16.pdf http://journalarticle.ukm.my/17138/ https://www.ukm.my/jkukm/volume-323-2020/ |
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| Summary: | Palm oil industry is one of the most important agriculture sectors in Malaysia. However, this industry produces a huge
amount of palm oil mill effluent (POME) which contains impurities that will pollute the environment. Hence, POME has to
be treated before it can be safely discharged to the environment. This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of tubular
ceramic membranes with different pore sizes (0.2 µm, 450 Da, and 200 Da) for the removal of turbidity and chemical
oxygen demand (COD) in POME. It was found that all of the ceramic membranes were capable to achieve more than 99% of
turbidity removal through size exclusion mechanism since the particles were larger in size as compared to membrane pores.
On the other hand, the reduction of COD was ineffective since the dissolved organic substances in POME could penetrate
the membrane and thus resulted in low removal efficiency. Flux decline was recognisable only when treated with the 0.2
µm membrane. It was attributed to its higher initial flux (16 Lm-2h
-1) that imposed larger permeation drag and brought
more impurities to quickly cover the membrane surface and clog the membrane pores during the initial filtration process.
Chemical cleaning was able to recover 77-83% of the flux and this shows that some of the impurities were still persisting
in the membrane. The tested membranes were capable to fully remove the suspended solids and could serve as a good pre-treatment process for subsequent COD reduction treatment process. |
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