Novel spent belaching earth industrial waste as low-cost ceramic membranes material: elaboration and characterization

Abstract

Ceramic membrane support derived from spent bleaching earth (SBE) become a novel study due to their low-cost, sustainable features, abundance material, and there is not yet applicated as membrane. In this study, flat disk ceramic membrane configuration was fabricated and characterized from solid waste of crude palm oil bleaching process by pressing method in different SBE loading mass (38–42 %wt.). The SBE as raw material was deoiled using n-hexane and acetone solvent, followed by fabricated it become flat disk SBE membranes. Afterward, the SBE flat disk membranes was characterized through fouriertransform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and X-ray fluorescence (XRF) analyzer. The result exhibits the flat disk SBE ceramic membrane has dimension of 41 and 6 mm for diameter and thickness, respectively. SBE membranes indicating have montmorillonite structure due to presence of silica as main component materials of SBE. Besides that, the existence of siloxane vibration band in SBE membranes for the sample after regeneration with n-hexane and acetone were dominated over using raw SBE. It concludes the oil residue was removed and produced SBE membrane properties become robust with less organic contaminant.