Lab

Water Treatment Lab

Membrane filtration is a very promising water treatment technology due to the small size, easy maintenance and superior water quality. However the drawback of the membrane filtration is fouling. Membrane fouling directly leads to increase in hydraulic increase and energy consumption, the decrease in permeate flux makes the filtration less efficient. Multiple methods have been proposed to solve membrane fouling problem. Physical methods, like backwash and suction, can only produce temporary recovery. Chemical reagents can cause severe damage to the membrane and be expensive to purchase and dispose. My work is mainly about the mineralization of various organics in waste water using electrochemical method. Electrochemical method is clean and uses only electrons as reagents. The probe compounds I am currently studying are tannic acid, oxalic acid and sodium alginate. Gamry potentiostat is the main instrument in my research, which is used to collect the OCP, CV and  EIS data.

Different potentials have been applied to the Ebonex membrane to see how much tannic acid can be destroyed. In current study, cathodic potential can recover more permeate flux than the anodic potential.