The Impact of Operational Parameters on Polypropylene Membrane Performance during the Separation of Oily Saline Wastewaters by the Membrane Distillation Process

In the present study, membrane distillation (MD) was applied for the treatment of oily saline wastewaters produced on ships sailing the Baltic Sea. For comparison purposes, experiments were also carried out with model NaCl solutions, the Baltic Seawater and oil in water emulsions. The commercial Accurel PP V8/2 membranes (Membrana GmbH, Germany) were used. In order to investigate the impact of the operational parameters on the process performance, the experiments were conducted under various values of the feed flow velocity (from 0.03 to 0.12 m/s) and the feed temperature (from 323 to 343 K). The obtained results highlight the potential of PP membranes application for a stable and reliable long-term treatment of oily wastewater. It was demonstrated that the permeate flux increased significantly with increasing feed temperature. However, the lower temperature ensured the limited scaling phenomenon during the treatment of oily wastewaters. Likewise, increasing the feed flow velocity was beneficial to the increase in the flux. Moreover, it was found that performing a cyclic rinsing of the module with a 3% HCl solution is an effective method to maintain a satisfactory module performance. The present study sheds light on improving the MD for the treatment of oily wastewaters.