Recovery of water and contaminants from cooling tower plume

Abstract

Membrane assisted condenser is an innovative membrane operation that exploits the hydrophobic nature of microporous membranes to promote water vapor condensation and recovery. It can be used for water and chemicals recovery from waste gaseous streams. In this work, the testing of membrane condenser for water and ammonia recovery from synthetic streams (i.e., a saturated air stream with ammonia) simulating the plume of cooling tower is illustrated. The modeling of the process was carried out for predicting the membrane-based process performance and for identifying the minimum operating conditions for effectively recovering liquid water. The experimental data were compared with the results achieved through the simulations showing good agreement and confirming the validity of the model. It was found that the recovery of water can be increased growing the temperature difference between the plume and the membrane module (DT), the relative humidity of the plume (RHplume) and the feed flow rate on membrane area ratio. Moreover, the concentration of NH3 in the recovered liquid water increased with the growing DT, at increasing NH3 concentration in the fed gaseous stream and at growing relative humidity of the feed.