Application of reverse osmosis to reduce pollutants present in industrial wastewater

Reverse osmosis (RO) is increasingly used as a separation technique in chemical and environmental engineering; desalination, selective separation and wastewater treatment are well established examples. Treatment by RO reduces high levels of dissolved salts but has certain limitations in the removal of organics from chemical industry effluents. We describe a comparative study of four different polyamide membranes that were tested for their ability to reduce the concentration of pollutants in a synthetic effluent stream containing acrylnitrile and three inorganic species (sulphate, ammonium and cyanide). The pH value of the solution plays an important role in the ionization of the different species and, subsequently, in their rejection. The membranes were checked using a 3 x 10(-3) m(2) flat cell where the permeated and concentrated currents were recirculated to the feed reservoir. In a preliminary set of experiments the pH of the feeding solution Was 9.0. The rejection percentage of sulphate ion was high in all the membranes tested (96% to 99.4%) regardless of the working pressure. Ammonium rejection values were between 72.3% and 83.9%, while acrylnitrile rejection was low (10.5% to 28.8%) compared with the results obtained for the other pollutants. Cyanide rejection was negative for all membranes tested except for HR95PP, which produced a rejection percentage of 16.5%. The same membrane also produced higher rejection percentages for cyanide and acryinitrile than the other membranes. Finally, this membrane was selected to study the influence of the feed stream pH on the rejection of ammonium and cyanide ions. The study concluded that cyanide and ammonium could not be acceptably eliminated in a single step operation when they are simultaneously present in industrial wastewater. The results pointed to the need to carry out several steps at different pH values to reduce the level of both pollutants in the studied wastewater.