Thermo-Fluid Dynamics Analysis of the Oil-Water Separation Using Ceramic Membrane

One of the main challenges related to the oil industry is the conscious disposal of effluents from the stages of oil exploration and production. The treatment of the water produced originated these processes has become a challenge for the sector. The membrane filtration technique emerges as an important tool in the treatment of these oily waters, due to their good characteristics, such as uniformity in permeate quality and long shelf life. In this work, a 2D mathematical model was developed, using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) as tool for the evaluation of the water-oil separation process in a tubular ceramic membrane. Linear momentum, energy, and mass conservation equations were used, which were solved using the commercial package ANSYS CFX® 15. The results obtained demonstrate that the developed model was able to predict the behavior of the water/oil separation process through the membrane, evidencing the influence of the oil particle size under the formation of the polarization layer by concentration, as well as, allowed to verify the importance of the temperature and the retention index of the solute under the permeation velocity and system performance.