The world’s water consumption has almost six doubled since 1920and it still increases due to rapid population growth, advanced industrialization, and the influence of climate changes. But with ceramic membranes, we can purify and recycle our scarce water resources. Nevertheless, multiple types of ceramic membrane support exist. It can be challenging to determine their unique advantages, how they filter, and which membrane supports are most suitable for your water treatment applications.
Let us dive into the details of the different ceramic membrane support designs.
Tubular membranes are the most common ceramic membranes. These are designed to remove suspended solids, oil droplets, and oil emulsions. Tubular membranes are ideal for treating produced water in the oil and gas market and industrial wastewater treatment.
The tubular membrane is designed as a long tube and is coated on the inside of the membrane. . Learn more about membrane coating here. There are two types of tubular membranes: a honeycomb structure and a monotube structure. The honeycomb membrane is a ceramic membrane with several parallel flow channels. A monotube structure is a ceramic membrane with one large flow channel. The honeycomb membrane with 30 flow channels is the most popular membrane type of all ceramic membranes. Due to the many flow channels, this membrane provides a large membrane surface area of 0.33 m2 for liquid filtration, making it capable of filtering a significant amount of liquid, although solely taking up a small footprint. This ensures a highly efficient and compact water filtration process. A whole membrane housing containing 99 ceramic membranes provides a membrane liquid filtration area of an impressive 32 m2.
The tubular membrane is typically used for crossflow configuration, which is the filtration type that is used the most. Still, it may also be used as dead-end filtration. These filtration types are denoted inside-out filtration because the liquid is filtered from inside the membrane and permeate flows outside. Dive more into the membrane filtration principles here.
In the honeycomb ceramic membrane, several parallel flow channels run through the membrane. Pressure from one end of the membrane will make the feed stream flow through the membrane, and this will be separated into permeate and concentrate. Learn more about how ceramic membranes work here.
The benefits of a tubular membrane counts:
Hybrid technology membranes (HTM) are a type of tubular membrane, as described above. They take the same form as a tubular membrane, work similarly, and are frequently used for crossflow configuration. The HTM membrane distinguishes from the conventional ceramic membrane by the material it is made of. The traditional ceramic membrane is made of 100% silicon carbide (SiC), while the HTM membrane combines silicon carbide and zirconia (ZrO2) to obtain the best of both worlds.
Combining these durable materials makes it possible to obtain unique and ground-breaking membrane properties. The HTM has a denser pore size of 60 nanometers (NM), making it an ultrafiltration technology. It can filter industrial liquids and wastewater at outstanding levels, enabling new separation processes and filtration applications.
The benefits of the hybrid technology ceramic membrane counts:
Aqua Solution® membranes are unique, patented LiqTech products designed for liquids with a reduced number of suspended solids. It is highly applicable for pre-treatment for reverse osmosis (RO), wastewater treatment, swimming pools, and spas. The Aqua Solution® membrane is designed as a large pipe with multiple channels and is coated inside the membrane.
This solution is heavily adopted in swimming pools and spas for several reasons:
The Aqua Solution® membrane is utilized as a dead-end filtration solution. This type of filtration is denoted inside-out filtration because the liquid is filtered for the inside of the membrane and permeate flows outside.
The benefits of the Aqua Solution® membranes counts:
All LiqTech’s ceramic membranes are based on silicon carbide, the world’s second-hardest material ever made. Learn more about the excellent material silicon carbide here. This extreme strength provides mechanical, thermal, and chemical strength and durability. The membranes can operate up to 800°C and are chemical resistant in all pH values from 0-14. This extreme strength provides a long lifetime, making your operation go on and on without interruptions.
