ABSTRACT
One of the most serious dangers to the environment is metallurgy, which produces a huge amount of wastewater every year. Common wastewater treatment technologies (such as distillation, crystallization and adsorption) for the removal of heavy metals suffer from low recovery efficiency, large area, high energy consumption, and production of secondary liquid or solid waste. In this work, wastewater from two different sources was examined and its treatment was modelled using Simulink (MATLAB). The process included either membrane distillation with membrane crystallization step or membrane distillation with the pretreatment stage by either electrodialysis or membrane extraction. It was shown that the pretreatment of wastewater either increases its efficiency or selectivity of the process. The air gap membrane distillation with porous condenser process requires 4–5 membrane replacements to produce 50–60 kg of CuSO4∙5H2O or 25 kg of NiSO4∙6H2O, and the performance can be significantly improved by the pretreatment with either electrodialysis or membrane extraction.
