- Thesis topic: Treatment of Chromium from Wastewater by Air Gap Membrane Distillation

- Doi: https://doi.org/10.6840/cycu202100826

- Abstract: 

     Chromium is one of the pollutant contaminations in industrial wastewater. It generally known as heavy metal that can be harsh for the health and safety of environment. Chromium is extremely toxic when inhaled or applied topically, causing lung cancer, nasal irritation, nasal ulcers, and hypersensitivity reactions such as contact dermatitis and asthma. The EPA rules limited amount that allowed for chromium in waterbody is 0.05 mg/L. The industrial wastewater detected chromium concentration approximately more than 19000 mg/L.
This study purpose to find the optimum parameter of air gap membrane distillation in chromium removal from industrial wastewater. The membrane distillation used membrane which has pore size 0.2 µm. The experiment arranges by design of experiment statistical method Placket Burman and Response surface model.
     Based on the statistical design of experiment results that the main effect in this research are chromium concentration and chloride concentration. It represents as P Value of chromium concentration and chloride concentration which less than 0.05.
The main effect of removal chromium is chromium concentration and chloride concentration. The removal efficiency of chromium removal achieved to more than 98% and the permeate flux of the water product is up to 12 kg/m2-h. Furthermore, the optimum parameter for Air Gap Membrane Distillation (AGMD) application in real industrial wastewater is feed flowrate 4 L/min, cooling water flowrate 2 L/min, feed temperature 70ºC.

Keywords: Air Gap Membrane Distillation, Chromium removal, Industrial wastewater, Water recovery, Permeate flux