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There are many treatment methods to remove contaminants from industrial wastewater and these are usually conducted in order to meet discharge limits and/or to reuse the treated water. One of the contaminants is salt content. The discharge limits for salts at the moment is not restrictive enough to force industries to implement treatment for this contaminant. This project aims at the evaluation of membrane technology (forward osmosis – FO, reverse osmosis – RO and a combination of the two) to remove these salts so that the treated water may be reused within the specific plant.
Aims: The main aim is to evaluate the viability of using the technology on a lab scale and then upscaling to a pilot plant.
The specific objectives are to:
• Investigate the permeate flux that is possible for various wastewaters using FO, RO and FO-RO systems
The project will assist industries to reduce the salt contaminants and possibly reuse the treated water within the plant, thus saving costs, reducing the negative environmental impact as well as reducing the demand on fresh water.
In keeping with the international sustainable development goals, technologies need to make sure that the use of fresh water is reduced and efforts are made to treat and reuse industrial wastewaters. The project aims to provide industries with a solution of bringing their wastewaters to reuse specifications. This will greatly reduce our demand for large amounts of fresh water, which is a precious commodity.
Prof Sudesh Rathilal Elorm Ezugbe and the possibility of two new MEng students Email: rathilals@dut.ac.za | Cell: 083 783 1964
The project started in June 2019 and the first phase should end by June 2021. The next phase of investigating many other industrial effluents and the development of a pilot-scale unit will start in February 2021 and end in December 2022.
R150 000
