Effects on the Performance of Filtration in a Constant-Pressure Stirred Membrane Reactor

Membrane fouling is a troublesome factor in the design and scale-up of stirred membrane reactors. Many efforts have been made to study the fouling mechanism in traditional membrane filtration. However, it is still ambiguous in stirred membrane reactors (SMRs). For this purpose, we investigated the effects of hydrodynamics on membrane filtration performance in SMRs under constant-pressure operation by combining experiment and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation. The results indicate that the strong axial flow is beneficial in maintaining the stability of membrane permeation, while the strong radial flow works oppositely. In addition, the formation of the filtration cake increases the total membrane filtration resistance but keeps smaller particles from blocking the membrane surface channels, which leads to filtration resistance multiplying rapidly. Hence, the formation of the thick cake, strong axial flow, and weak radial flow is conducive to maintaining permeation flux in order to reduce the replacement of the membrane and improve the period of continuous production.