Development of Effective Water Cleaning Process Methods for F&B Water Filtration System

Abstract

Abstract The daily processes in an F&B (Food and Beverage) industry requires massive amount of water usage that is cleaned by a RO (Reverse Osmosis) membrane. The aim of this study was to study cleaning process of water filtration and propose a new membrane design module for a more efficient approach in cleaning. Membrane cleaning involving chemical and physical aspects has been discussed in this study. Physical cleaning requires the use of velocity and wall shear stress that have been focused on through simulation. In RO membrane treatment, particles are transported based on solution-diffusion mechanism and convective flow that have been studied for improvements in module design. A different structure of spiral-wound membrane module was constructed based on various winding angle and radius between one membrane leaves to another. The compatibility of the new membrane design has been tested through a commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software simulation ANSYS Fluent v19.2. Fluids with varying Reynolds number in the range of 4000 to 6000 were integrated for testing. Both existing membrane model and new proposed membrane model were simulated with the same boundary conditions for a justifiable comparison. Based on this study, it was found that the new proposed triangular model was able to achieve higher velocity, wall shear stress and turbulent kinetic energy compared to the existing cylindrical model.