Development of olive mill wastewater treatment by novel functionalized carbon nanotube/polyethersulfone ultrafiltration membrane

Olive oil mill wastewater (OMW) is known as the highest organic loads of concentrated effluents, especially with high organic chemical oxygen demand (COD). Membrane processes for wastewater treatment have several advantages, which their use is strongly justifiable. However, One common problem of membrane filtration is fouling that strongly affect on membrane performance and selectivity. In order to overcome these problems different pretreatments were used. In this work the novel UF membranes with different concentration of Functionalized Multi Wall Carbon Nano Tube (F-MWCNT) were used for OMW treatment due to attain high COD removal. The effects of operatinon parameters including pressure and temperature have been investigated on the UF system flux permeation and COD removal. The Taguchi method was applied to design of experiment and optimization. Under the optimum operation conditions suggested by Taguchi, flux and COD removal of UF filtration were obtained 18.1 (kg/m2 hr) and 40.6%, respectively, which were conformed with the predicted results by Taguchi (17.3 kg/m2 hr and 39.9% for flux and COD removal, respectively). The observed results show that the most important parameter is membrane type which the using CNT in the matrix of PES UF membranes was improved COD removal considarably.