Assessing and simulation of membrane technology for modifying starchy wastewater treatment

In this study, a hydrophilic polyethersulfone membrane was used to modify the expensive and low efficient conventional treatment method of wheat starch production that would result in a cleaner starch production process. To achieve a cleaner production, the efficiency of starch production was enhanced and the organic loading rate of wastewater that was discharged into treatment system was decreased, simultaneously. To investigate the membrane performance, the dependency of rejection factor and permeate flux on operative parameters such as temperature, flow rate, concentration, and pH of feed were studied. Response surface methodology (RSM) has been applied to arrange the experimental layout which reduced the number of experiments and also the interactions between the parameters were considered. The maximum achieved rejection factor and permeate flux were 97.5% and 2.42 L min−1 m−2, respectively. Furthermore, a fuzzy inference system was selected to model the non-linear relations between input and output variable which cannot easily explained by physical models. The best agreement between the experimental and predicted data for permeate flux was denoted by correlation coefficient index (R2) of 0.9752 and mean square error (MSE) of 0.0072 where defuzzification operator was center of rotation (centroid). Similarly, the maximum R2 for rejection factor was 0.9711 where the defuzzification operator was mean of maxima (mom). © 2016, The Author(s).