Rotating Reverse Osmosis Membrane System forRecycling Space Mission Wastewater

摘要

Reverse Osmosis (RO) is a compact process for the removal of ionic and organic pollutantsfrom space mission wastewater. However, flux decline and rejection deterioration due toconcentration polarization and membrane fouling hinders the application of RO technology.Among various anti- fouling techniques, rotating filtration, which takes advantage of centrifugalflow instabilities, has potential to control flux decline due to concentration polarization andmembrane fouling. In this work, rotating RO system for long range space missions wasinvestigated as a novel method to reduce polarization and fouling in water purification.A dynamic model based on RO membrane transport incorporating concentration polarizationis used to predict the performance of rotating RO system. Operating parameters such asrotational speed and transmembrane pressure play an important role in determining the flux andrejection in rotating RO. For a given geometry, a rotational speed sufficient to generate Taylorvortices in the annulus is essential to maintain high flux as well as high rejection.