Simulation of membrane ageing to go ahead in fouling and cleaning understanding during skim milk ultrafiltration

In dairy industry, the mastering of membrane fouling and cleaning remains a bottleneck of membrane processes especially for aged and degraded membranes. This paper reports an in-depth study of the impact of membrane chemical ageing due to NaOCl disinfection on the fouling and cleaning of PES/PVP membranes. Fouling by skim milk was performed at critical and limiting flux found to have an impact on the initial irreversible fouling, i.e. the one remaining after water rinsing. Furthermore, for filtrations performed with pristine membranes, the fouling removal by formulated alkaline detergents was also affected by the filtration conditions. On the contrary, aged membranes were highly irreversibly fouled whatever the operating conditions. Furthermore, they were shown to be more difficult to clean than pristine ones. Besides these results, this study provides the validation of an original approach based on the use of micro-waves activation to study the membrane degradation. (C) 2018 Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.