Abstract:
Computational fluid dynamics is applied in membranes modules to study the mass transport and flux for separation of the binary mixture. In the present study, computational fluid dynamics modeling is performed to check the concentration polarization phenomena for binary gas mixture in particular membrane modules. The three-dimensional membrane modules have been considered for finding the mass flux and parametric study to obtain the flow profiles. The membrane model is defined in software for using the permeabilities of asymmetric membranes for gas separation. The membrane is considered as a thin diffusion barrier which has a corresponding thickness to separate the binary gas mixture. CFD allows changing the specification of membrane module to finds the different parameters of the module. Fick’s law is used to find the mass flux in all membrane modules and required less slight computational requirements. Cross-flow and counter-current membrane model is applied for flow pattern in all membrane modules. Different gas mixture like O2/N2, CO2/CH4, CH4/CO2 and CH4/C2H6 is used in a hollow fiber, spiral wound, tubular and flat sheet membrane module. The different parameters of membrane modules like feed pressure permeate pressure, membrane thickness, module length and feed concentration has investigated for finding flow profiles and diffusive fluxes. The results show that concentration polarization has negligible effect on the performance of membrane modules performance for gas separation. The obtained results have been compared with the experimental and verify the performed simulations for different module configurations.
