Abstract
The introduction of flow instabilities into a microfiltration process can dramatically change several elements such as the surface-renewal rate, permeate flux, specific cake resistance, and cake buildup on the membrane in a positive way. A recently developed surface-renewal model for constant-pressure, cross-flow microfiltration (Hasan et al., 2013) is applied to the permeate-flux data reported by Mallubhotla and Belfort (1997), one set of which included flow instabilities (Dean vortices) while the other set did not. The surface-renewal model has two forms - the complete model and an approximate model. For the complete model, the introduction of vortices leads to a 53% increase in the surface-renewal rate, which increases the limiting (i.e., steady-state) permeate flux by 30%, decreases the specific cake resistance by 14.5% and decreases the limiting cake mass by 15.5% compared to operation without vortices. For the approximate model, a 50% increase in the value of surface renewal rate is shown due to vortices, which increases the limiting permeate flux by 30%, decreases the specific cake resistance by 10.5% and decreases the limiting cake mass by 13.7%. The cake-filtration version of the critical-flux model of microfiltration (Field et al., 1995) is also compared against the experimental permeate-flux data of Mallubhotla and Belfort (1997). Although this model can represent the data, the quality of its fit is inferior compared to that of the surface-renewal model.