ABSTRACT
Membrane filtration is a technology that has provided a new dimension to industrial separation processes with its diverse applications ensuring environmental safety, high purity products and elevated efficiency. It can be easily retrofitted to any existing industrial unit operation to help improve process technology, enhance product purity, facilitate effluent treatment to meet challenges such as separation of azeotropic mixtures of aqueous-organic and organic-organic systems, which otherwise involve an extremely tedious, time-consuming and expensive modus operandi. The performance of any membrane operation is modulated by the flow field inside the membrane module, transport phenomenon, modular geometry and other operating conditions. To understand the flow phenomena and behavior of the membrane module under existing conditions, analysis is indeed required both at macroscopic and microscopic levels. Theoretical models based on mass and heat transfer have been developed in the early 1960s to predict the performance of membrane process. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is an important tool used to understand the basic transport phenomenon in a membrane process. Similarly, molecular modeling is a helpful technique to identify new membrane materials and determine the interaction of feed components with polymeric membranes. This study focuses on application of CFD and molecular modeling for design of popular membrane processes such as ultrafiltration, nanofiltration, pervaporation, forward osmosis and reverse osmosis. The primary intention is to compile the entire gamut of past research outcomes regarding how CFD and molecular modeling tools can be utilized to visualize changes occurring in a membrane system at the molecular level with variation in design and operational parameters, and thus to give scale-up the appeal of a feasible process.
