Economic analysis and design of crossflow microfiltration for water treatment systems

Membrane technology is an emerging scientific field and is being widely use d in many industrial manufacturing processes and also for desalination. Rec ently its application in water and wastewater treatment systems is gaining popularity in developed countries where in the effluent wastewater and pota ble water standards are becoming more and more stringent. The recent develo pments in microfiltration enable it to be competitive with other convention al water treatment systems. This paper presents a design procedure for cros sflow microfiltration (CFMF) incorporating a comprehensive flux improvement technique. Also it gives an economical comparison with a conventional trea tment system. The simulation results have shown that for small treatment pl ants (similar to 4 ML/d) with medium turbidity water, having greater fracti on of finer particles, the single-stage treatment with CFMF can be cheaper than that of a conventional treatment system. The cost savings are found to be between 6% and 12%; larger savings are for the influents with a greater fraction of finer particles. Further, some of the advantages of the CFMF p rocess over conventional water treatment systems are discussed. However, as there are many assumptions involved in this study, further research is war ranted to generalize the above conclusions.