New low-cost ceramic microfiltration membrane made from natural magnesite for industrial wastewater treatment

This paper mainly focuses on the preparation of new low-cost ceramic microfiltration membrane made from natural magnesite. Firstly, local Moroccan magnesite was deeply characterized in order to understand its chemical and mineralogical composition, and its thermal behavior. It was confirmed that used natural magnesite exhibits high purity degree in terms of magnesite mineral. Next, flat magnesite membrane was fabricated via uniaxial pressing and sintering methods. The effect of sintering in the range 900-1200 degrees C on morphology, porosity, pore size, permeability and mechanical strength was investigated. Based on experimental results, the optimized membrane (sintered at 1100 degrees C) has a porosity of 48.15 %, a pore size of 1.12 mu m, a water permeability of 922 L h(-1) m(-2) bar(-1) and a mechanical strength of 6.1 MPa. Finally, the optimized magnesite membrane was subjected to filtration of industrial textile wastewater in order to evaluation its performance as microfiltration membrane. Importantly, experimental results are clearly demonstrated that magnesite membrane effectively clarifies textile wastewater. It was showed that turbidity and chemical oxygen demand removals could achieve 99.9 and 69.7 %, respectively.