Abstract:
Membrane based separation process is an emerging field among the other disciplines of physical separation like extraction and chromatography due to its simplicity, environment friendliness and low cost. A gas permeation model has been developed which has the flexibility to be used for different module configurations. The aim of this work is to predict the performance of a single stage gas separation process using membranes and provide a comprehensive description of process parameters like flow rates, and external pressures during the operation. The different module configurations like cross flow, co-current and counter-current have been studied and individual algorithm has been designed for each case with the help of respective mathematical relationships. Moreover, the algorithms and computer coding used for the separation purpose have been extended up to nine components in contrary to the method reported in literature which has four components in a gaseous mixture. The significant feature of this work is the development of computational model for counter-current flow mode. Comparing with the other counter-current models already reported in literature, the gas permeation model developed in this work does not require initial conditions to start and also independent of any adjustment technique like shooting method. This model is based on real membrane operation and works by the coupling of co-current and counter-current methods. The output values of co-current mode become the input values for counter current case after each iteration. During the analysis of pressure difference across the membrane, the cumbersome condition of inserting hard code values of pressure difference and checking the process response at each value can be encountered which may take more computing time. To remove this problem, a methodology is used in which the setup runs only one time and system response can be checked at different values of pressure. The results obtained are validated with the published data and will be discussed to elaborate the operation of a gas separation membrane.
