CFD modeling of permeate flux in cross-flow microfiltration membrane

This paper reports the results of a study on a three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation for predicting the water permeate flux through a microfiltration membrane. The pressure distribution upon the membrane surface was obtained using an in-house CFD package. The localized permeate flux was obtained by using local pressures in the well-known Darcy equation. The total flux was calculated by integrating the local permeate fluxes over the whole membrane surface. The permeate flux is predicted for various input–output pressures as well as various cells setup, including a cell equipped with three types of barrier and the same cell without any barrier. In order to validate the CFD predictions, laboratory experiments were carried out using a commercial GVWP microfiltration membrane, supplied by Millipore Company. The results show that the CFD flux prediction is more accurate in comparison with a simple calculation, in which the average input–output pressures substituted for feed side pressure in the Darcy equation. The effect of transmembrane pressure and fluid mass flow rate on simple and CFD predictions were investigated. The higher performance of CFD prediction was obtained in lower transmembrane pressures.