Flux Characteristics of Oil Separation from O/W Emulsions using Highly Hydrophilic UF Membrane in Narrow Channel

Flux characteristics of oil separation from O/W emulsions using highly hydrophilic polymeric UF membrane has been investigated. The effect of using sub-millimeter filtration channel on both unsteady and steady state permeate flux is evaluated. The time-dependent flux characteristics indicated that membrane fouling has proceeded mainly according to the intermediate pore blocking mechanism modified for crossflow filtration. The steady state flux increased initially with the transmembrane pressure (TMP), then reached a plateau at a relatively low TMP of ∼15 kPa, beyond which a steady operation was achieved, and there were practically no advantages of increasing the TMP. The pressure independent limiting flux increased with increasing the crossflow velocity and was found to scale with the membrane surface shear rate to the power of 0.35. The data were modeled satisfactorily using a dimensionally consistent semi-empirical model with R2 value of 0.96.