The recovery of copper by tubular supported liquid membranes

Abstract

During recent years, the use of liquid membranes has gained general interest in the treatment of effiuents where solute concentrations are low and large volumes of solutions should be processed, and, if possible, without generating any secondary waste. Liquid membrane processes have been proposed as a clean technology, owing to their characteristics, i.e. high specificity, low energy and utilization. Two liquid membrane processes have been used in metal recovery, which are the liquid surfactant membrane (LSM), which corresponds to double water-in-oil emulsion and solid . supported liquid membranes (SLM), which are made by dispersing or impregnating the extractant within the pores of in.ert solid support. Previously, the recovery of eu (IT) in a SLM system was conducted by other membrane models such as hollow fibre, spiral and flat sheet. Only a small measure of success on scale-up and industrialization of these models has been attained. One of the disadvantages of the hollow fibre system was the small lumen size through which the feed needed to pass. Pores became clogged by suspended particles because the pressure drop over the small diameter augments lower flow rates and therefore, pre-filtering is necessary (Rathore, et al., 2001). In this study the behaviour of a tubular SLM reactor with an inner diameter of the lumen approximately fifty times bigger than that of the hollow fibre are used in order to solve the problem of clogging. This tubular reactor was incorporated in to a bench scale plant and proved successful in copper extraction. By observing transient data, mass transport coefficients were determined and compared to published values.