Development of Box Behnken Design to Predict the Optimum Operating Condition of Rectangular Sheet Membrane to Increase Permeate Flux

Motivation And Background

The Global scarcity of water resource and rapid degradation of water quality has advocated for water reclamation and reuse(Lyu, Chen, Zhang, Fan, & Jiao, 2016). So, the membrane is widely used for water reclamation and overcoming water scarcity.

The membrane was a well-known technique since the eighteen century and implemented for water reclamation. The membrane widely used in different industries like the food industry, paper industry, and rubber industry (Mohammadi, Man, Hassan, & Yee, 2013)(Zhou, Zhao, Bai, Zhang, & Tang, 2012). Membrane separation technique are classified as microfiltration(Lim & Bai, 2003), ultra filtration(Abdessemed, Nezzal, & Ben Aim, 2000) and reverse osmosis (Sahinkaya et al., 2019)(Tong et al., 2020) and implemented to improve quality of water feed stream. Membrane attracted many researchers and environmental scientists for its ability to produce high quality of permeate with high reuse potential, but it is limited in its application for its rapid fouling tendency. Fouling is due to partial and complete pore blocking of the membrane during the separation process (Tong et al., 2020)(Liu, Wu, Hou, & Wang, 2020). To predict optimum operating factors and enhance permeate flux, Box Behnken method used in the present study.