Tight ultrafiltration membranes for enhanced separation of dyes and Na2SO4 during textile wastewater treatment

• Tight UF membrane can be an alternative to NF membrane to fractionate the dye/Na2SO4 mixture.
• No obvious effect is observed on dye rejection of tight UF membrane after the addition of Na2SO4.
• 5-diavolume diafiltration by tight UF membrane removes 98% of Na2SO4 from the feed.
• Over 97% dye recovery is obtained after diafiltration by UF membrane due to high dye rejection.

Nanofiltration (NF) membranes have been used previously for the recovery of dyes, salts, and water from textile wastewaters with high salinity. However, commercially available NF membranes have a high rejection for divalent salts (i.e., Na2SO4), substantially reducing the salt recovery and membrane flux when treating textile wastewater containing Na2SO4. In this study, a tight ultrafiltration membrane (UH004, Microdyn-Nadir) was proposed to fractionate the dye and Na2SO4 in the textile wastewater. The UH004 membrane with a molecular weight cutoff of 4700 Da provided complete passage of monovalent salts, with little rejection of Na2SO4. This significantly increases the filtrate flux that can be achieved with high-salinity wastewater since osmotic pressure and concentration polarization effects are minimized. Furthermore, the retention behavior of four different dyes was evaluated to determine the efficiency of this membrane process. This tight ultrafiltration membrane offered the high retention for direct dyes (i.e., direct red 80, direct red 23, and Congo red) and reactive blue 2. For instance, the UH004 membrane yielded >98.9% rejection for all of the dyes at a pressure of 4 bar even in the presence of 60 g L−1 Na2SO4. Subsequently, an ultrafiltration-diafiltration process was designed to separate a dye/Na2SO4 aqueous mixture with 98% desalination efficiency and greater than 97% dye recovery after 5 diavolumes. These results clearly demonstrate that tight ultrafiltration membranes can be a stand-alone alternative to NF membranes for the effective fractionation of dye and Na2SO4 in the direct treatment of high-salinity textile wastewater.

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