Numerical study of the nanoparticles effect on the desalination process

Abstract

The nanofiltration (NF) process becomes the most recently used technologies for the desalination of seawater and brackish water. The porous media transport properties are first related to the geometrical complexity of the product. However, the membrane transport models used in desalination process constitute approximatively the less understood process. The objective of this work is to address modeling and numerical study of the desalination process of the water and ions fluxes by using a porous membrane with nanoparticles. Our filtration system used is constituted by two different zones that the membrane sheets are sandwiched. The fluid undergoes a first simple filtration and a second NF process by the injected nanoparticles. The impacts of the permeability [Formula: see text] and porosity [Formula: see text] of the membrane under the effect of a pressure [Formula: see text] were discussed. Our findings are obtained in the framework of the dynamic Langevin approach based on the competitiveness between the stochastic process and dissipation. The results show that the performance of the rejection membrane is significant as the nanoparticle concentration decreases, and increases as a power law with the ratio of the viscosity of the salty fluid to the pure fluid.