Abstract:
Pervaporation process is an excellent and potential way applied for desalting acid
mine drainage water. Nevertheless, the water flux was reduced gradually due to the issue of
membrane fouling. To resolve this problem, cleaning process was chosen to maintain the water
flux of silica-pectin membranes. This study aims to recover the water flux and salt rejection of
the silica-pectin membranes via chemical cleaning process applied for acid mine drainage water
desalination with various temperature of feed water (25-60°C). Silica-pectin membrane was
formulated by employing TEOS functioning as silica precursor and pectin as carbon template
from banana peels. Chemical cleaning of the membrane carried out by employing TiO2 solution
+ UV light radiation for an hour. Performance of the silica-pectin membrane was evaluated via
pervaporation process under dead-end system. The performance of silica-pectin banana peels
membrane found flux recovery from 10.6 kg.m-2
.h-1
and flux recovery of 17.54 kg.m-2
.h-1
. It
shows that flux recovery higher than before backwashing process. Also, silica-pectin membrane
results in all of the salt rejection <99%. It is concluded that the chemical backwashing process
is important to apply to recover the water flux of membrane, also, this process considers to save
and reduce the operational costs.
