IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jsusta/v1y2009i4p978-993d6094.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Membrane Processes Based on Complexation Reactions of Pollutants as Sustainable Wastewater Treatments

Author

Listed:
  • Raffaele Molinari

    (Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials, University of Calabria, Via P. Bucci, 44/A, I-87030 Rende (CS), Italy)

  • Pietro Argurio

    (Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials, University of Calabria, Via P. Bucci, 44/A, I-87030 Rende (CS), Italy)

  • Teresa Poerio

    (Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials, University of Calabria, Via P. Bucci, 44/A, I-87030 Rende (CS), Italy)

Abstract

Water is today considered to be a vital and limited resource due to industrial development and population growth. Developing appropriate water treatment techniques, to ensure a sustainable management, represents a key point in the worldwide strategies. By removing both organic and inorganic species using techniques based on coupling membrane processes and appropriate complexing agents to bind pollutants are very important alternatives to classical separation processes in water treatment. Supported Liquid Membrane (SLM) and Complexation Ultrafiltration (CP-UF) based processes meet the sustainability criteria because they require low amounts of energy compared to pressure driven membrane processes, low amounts of complexing agents and they allow recovery of water and some pollutants (e.g., metals). A more interesting process, on the application point of view, is the Stagnant Sandwich Liquid Membrane (SSwLM), introduced as SLM implementation. It has been studied in the separation of the drug gemfibrozil (GEM) and of copper(II) as organic and inorganic pollutants in water. Obtained results showed in both cases the higher efficiency of SSwLM with respect to the SLM system configuration. Indeed higher stability (335.5 vs. 23.5 hours for GEM; 182.7 vs. 49.2 for copper(II)) and higher fluxes (0.662 vs. 0.302 mmol·h -1 ·m -2 for GEM; 43.3 vs. 31.0 for copper(II)) were obtained by using the SSwLM. Concerning the CP-UF process, its feasibility was studied in the separation of metals from waters (e.g., from soil washing), giving particular attention to process sustainability such as water and polymer recycle, free metal and water recovery. The selectivity of the CP-UF process was also validated in the separate removal of copper(II) and nickel(II) both contained in synthetic and real aqueous effluents. Thus, complexation reactions involved in the SSwLM and the CP-UF processes play a key role to meet the sustainability criteria.

Suggested Citation

  • Raffaele Molinari & Pietro Argurio & Teresa Poerio, 2009. "Membrane Processes Based on Complexation Reactions of Pollutants as Sustainable Wastewater Treatments," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 1(4), pages 1-16, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:1:y:2009:i:4:p:978-993:d:6094
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/1/4/978/pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/1/4/978/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Zan Li & Hongkun Zhang & Wenrui Jiang, 2021. "Research on the Sustainable Heterogeneous Catalyst Development for Photocatalytic Treatment of Phenol," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(9), pages 1-12, April.
    2. Beibei Zhang & Chunhai Yi & Dongyun Wu & Jie Qiao & Lihua Zhang, 2023. "A High-Permeance Organic Solvent Nanofiltration Membrane via Polymerization of Ether Oxide-Based Polymeric Chains for Sustainable Dye Separation," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(4), pages 1-16, February.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:1:y:2009:i:4:p:978-993:d:6094. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.