Experimental and CFD Study on the Role of Fluid Flow Pattern on Membrane Permeate Flux

This paper reports a study on the role of fluid flow pattern and dynamic pressure on the permeate flux through a micro filtration membrane in laboratory scale. For this purpose, a dead-end membrane cell equipped with a marine type impeller was used. The impeller was set to rotate in the clockwise and counter clockwise directions with the same angular velocities in order to illustrate the effect of rotation direction on permeate flux. Consequently, permeate fluxes were measured at various impeller rotational speeds. The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) predicted dynamic pressure was related to the fluxes obtained in the experiments. Using the CFD modeling, it is proven that the change in dynamic pressure upon the membrane surface has direct effect on the permeate flux.