Intensification of heat and mass transfer by ultrasound: Application to heat exchangers and membrane separation processes

• Intensification of heat transfer by ultrasound in a double-tube heat exchanger.
• Enhancement of overall heat transfer coefficients in a brazed plate heat exchanger.
• Reduction and prevention of fouling caused by calcium carbonate precipitation.
• Increase of permeate fluxes in ultrasonically-assisted ultrafiltration.
• Effect of ultrasound at membrane/solution interface depends on filtered suspensions.

This paper aims to illustrate the interest of ultrasound technology as an efficient technique for both heat and mass transfer intensification. It is demonstrated that the use of ultrasound results in an increase of heat exchanger performances and in a possible fouling monitoring in heat exchangers. Mass transfer intensification was observed in the case of cross-flow ultrafiltration. It is shown that the enhancement of the membrane separation process strongly depends on the physico-chemical properties of the filtered suspensions.