Ultrafiltration Membrane for POME Treatment: Comparison Physical & Chemical Cleaning Process

Membrane technology has been improved and implied in wide range of application such as in food, chemical, medicine and many more. Nevertheless, the application of membrane in the separation process for treating palm oil mill effluent (POME) has not been applied on an industrial scale though researches have proven many advantageous of membrane system over conventional treatment such as high efficiency, low space requirement and low energy consumption. The main obstacle in using membrane in treating POME is fouling as it increase in cost and energy of the process, process down time and decrease in the efficiency. To overcome the challenge specific cleaning process for ultrafiltration membrane for palm oil mill effluent treatment is the current focus study. The experiments were conducted on polysulfone membrane with molecular weight cut off 30 KDa. The effect of physical cleaning of forward flushing and backwashing were compared. The effect of different chemical cleaning of; sodium hydroxide, hydrochloric acid and sodium dodecylbenzene sulfonate were studied. Comparison between physical of backwashing and chemical cleaning by immersed in NaOH solution were performed to eliminate the fouling with the aims to minimize the time consume and maximize the membrane efficiency. Combination of both physical and chemical cleaning gave an interesting trend of reducing and increasing of membrane performance. Membrane separation process has improved the quality of the final effluent. The results show that by introducing the cleaning process, the performance of the flux can be recovered to more than 80 percent.