Economical treatment of reverse osmosis reject of textile industry effluent by electrodialysis–evaporation integrated process

• Electrodialysis for concentration of RO reject to reduce volume load on evaporator.
• Optimization of experimental parameters to design a pilot system.
• Economic estimation of hybrid process for concentration of RO reject.

Membrane separation methods such as electrodialysis (ED) can reduce the volume load on evaporators by facilitating further concentration of rejects from reverse osmosis (RO) plants. ED studies were carried out on a bench-scale system using five membrane cell pairs to obtain a textile effluent concentrate containing approximately 6 times the quantity of salts present in the RO reject. The limiting current densities were determined to be in the range 2.15–3.35 amp/m2 for feed flow rates varying from 18 to 108 L/h. Apart from feed rate, the influence of volume of concentrate and current on membrane performance was evaluated to optimize current utilization. An estimation of energy requirement of an integrated process constituting ED and evaporation for concentration of inorganics present in textile effluent from 4.35% to 24% was made and found to be approximately one eighth of the operating cost incurred by evaporation alone. Detailed design of a commercial ED system revealed that a membrane area of 13.1 m2 was required to treat a feed rate of 1500 L/h. The payback period to recover capital investment was found to be 110 days.