Ceramic membrane
Ceramic membrane is mechanically, chemically and thermally more than 10 times more stable than a polymer membrane in its application. Despite its advantages the only disadvantage led to its limited application is its cost of manufacturing due to critical technology and high energy intensive fabrication process.
Drinking Water Treatment
Large water treatment plants are stuffed with qualified workforce that can deal with the huge technical challenges and operational problems of age old polymer membrane system operational in the developed countries. It is worst in the developing and under developing country as they used conventional treatment process involve huge chemical and high skill manpower, which results in compromising water quantity. Rural communities require robust filtration plant without any chemical pre-treatment and minimal post-filtration with low maintenance and high life.
Seawater RO pre-treatment
MF Ceramic membrane is a competitive pre-treatment process for desalination using RO in terms of its higher flux and more stable operation characteristics than common organic/polymer membrane systems. The objective of pre-treatment before reverse osmosis (RO) membranes is to remove undesirable and particulate fouling materials (algae, suspended and colloidal particles).
Water treatments- ETP & STP
Ceramic membranes have many advantages such as durability, chemical resistance, high flux, and long life span. However, they generally require relatively high initial investment cost compared to polymeric membranes when they are used for a water treatment process. Therefore, if ceramic membranes are considered to be applied to a water treatment plant (WTP), the life cycle cost (LCC) analysis should be performed to evaluate its economic feasibility.
Dairy
Membrane technology has revolutionized the dairy sector. Different types of membranes are used in the industry for various purposes like extending the shelf life of milk without exposure to heat treatment, standardization of the major components of milk for tailoring new products as well increasing yield and quality of the dairy products, and concentrating, fractionation and purification of milk components especially valuable milk proteins in their natural state. In the cheese industry, membranes increase the yield and quality of cheese and control the whey volume, by concentrating the cheese milk. The membrane separation techniques utilized in the dairy industry serve different purposes: UF – typically used for concentration of milk proteins in milk and whey and for protein standardization of milk intended for cheese, yoghurt and other products, but it is also used for clarification of fruit- and berry-juices MF – mostly used for reduction of bacteria in skimmed milk, whey and brine, but also for defatting whey intended for whey protein concentrate (WPC) and for protein fractionation Ceramic membranes is steadily gaining ground in the dairy industry, especially in systems for the reduction of bacteria in milk, whey, WPC and brine
Distillery & Sugar
Internationally, Ceramic membrane filters have been used for many years in beverage filtering applications including beer. In recent years the wine industry has widely adopted cross-flow filters with ceramic membrane with the membrane life being over 10 years. Across the wine and cider industries cross-flow filters are an accepted process. In Indian Distillery industries, the wastewater from distillery column called spent wash liquor. Spent liquor contains lot of suspended and dissolved impurities mainly organic, color, TDS, oil. Due to presence of high amount of impurities it is very difficult to control parameters as per pollution board limit by conventional wastewater treatment plant. Here Ceramic membrane technology has answer. This spent wash liquor can pass through Digester to convert organic load in to Biogas which is used as a fuel of Stream and Power generation and then passed through membrane system to produce pure water or to be pass through per filtration followed by Membrane system without using primary and/or secondary conventional wastewater treatment. Membrane system will separate pure water which will be recycled in process and reject of membrane system can be further concentrated by thermal energy and directly used as a bio fuel. After preparing beer solution in fermentation process prior to distillation it should be passed through membrane system. This membrane system will remove all kind of suspended solids and high molecular weight dissolved impurities. This will help to improve the efficiency of distillery column in terms of heat transfer and maintenance as well as treatment cost of effluent treatment plant will drastically reduce. Due to saving in energy consumption in Distillery Industries by using Membrane system prior to distillation, it is crystal clear that CO2 emission also reduced substantially. This will help to reduce ozone layer depletion resulting improvement in environment.
Textile
Textile industry is one of the most polluting industries not only due to the high water consumption, but also due to the wide variety of substrates and chemicals used in different process steps. These processes generate large volumes of strongly colored waste waters with high load of toxic organic and inorganic compounds. Nowadays, due to the increasing environmental requirements, textile industry needs to adopt a sustainable approach, where at least 90% of the used chemicals are recycled or treated before their release in the environment. Ceramic Membrane-based separation processes have gradually become an attractive alternative to the conventional separation processes in the treatment of wastewater, since their application allow high removal efficiencies and also provide recovery and recycling of water and chemicals.