| About this Abstract |
| Meeting |
MS&T22: Materials Science & Technology
|
| Symposium
|
Synthesis, Characterization, Modeling and Applications of Functional Porous Materials
|
| Presentation Title |
Modeling Transport Characteristics of RO Membranes Using Macrovoid Resolved Simulations |
| Author(s) |
Vimal Ramanuj, Ramanan Sankaran, Luka Malenica, Kyle Cole, Marc Day, Jeffrey McCutcheon |
| On-Site Speaker (Planned) |
Vimal Ramanuj |
| Abstract Scope |
The transport characteristics of a reverse osmosis (RO) membrane are known to be highly dependent on the microstructures specifically, the topology of macrovoids resulting from specific manufacturing methods or changes due to compaction in High Pressure Reverse Osmosis (HPRO). The presentation will focus on high resolution computational studies of HPRO relevant membrane geometries with emphasis on flow characteristics including channeling effects due to the presence of macrovoids. Flow channeling is observed when the heterogeneity in the porous structure leads to locally high permeability paths. Synthetic microstructures are constructed to statistically capture the geometric features of a two-scale porous membrane based on published experimental visualizations. Simulations are conducted over a range of parameters to capture transition of flow characteristics from material governed to macrovoid governed. Computed tortuosity and permeability are analyzed, and an enhanced model based on flux-weighted porosity is proposed and compared with existing correlations from literature. |