Treatment and valorisation of an industrial effluent by pervaporation

Pervaporation is increasingly used as separation process in industry. First application was devoted to ethanol dehydration. Recent works mention pervaporation as an efficient treatment economically valid for waste water. This paper presents the results established using an industrial fuel. Such salty aqueous mixtures of organic compounds are frequently encountered and are actually difficult to treat as useless effluents. Moreover, there is no simple one-step treatment which seems acceptable: usual water treatment would not succeed due to organic compounds disturbing the biological activity, whilst salts prevent from classical incineration due to the strong corrosion induced. A preliminary separation step is therefore required in order to obtain salts and organic compounds in different streams, each of them remaining acceptable for reuse or further easy treatment. We present typical results which demonstrate that pervaporation offers such opportunities. In addition, these results demonstrate that a model previously published for pervaporation is also appropriate for multicomponent transfers. Coupling effects are shown and quantitatively estimated.