Chemical Cleaning to Evaluate the Performance of Silica-Pectin Membrane on Acid Mine Drainage Desalination

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.