Research

Study on the water and environmental process for industries and cities

The difference of the osmotic pressure, or the difference of chemical potential works to transport water through the membrane while retaining organic pollutants on the other side.
The concentrated organic pollutants are fed to anaerobic digester to convert methane gas.

In conventional system, reverse osmosis (RO) membrane is used to recycle wastewater in industry. RO system need high pressure and consume high energy to overcome the osmotic pressure of feed solution.

In forward osmosis membrane system, water in feed solution (FS) move to draw solution (DS) by the difference of osmotic pressure, then water in DS is recovered. Because the driving force to permeate water through the membrane is the difference of osmotic pressure or chemical potential, the energy consumption in FO membrane system is much smaller than that of RO membrane system in principle. Low-grade waste heat can be used to recover the water from the DS.

Submerged membrane element system in which the pretreatment may be omitted.

The dense anaerobically digested sludge, which contains solid in high concentration, shows very complicated flow behavior. The apparent viscosity deceases with shear rate and decreases with shearing time. It is quite different from pure water. The modeling is studied in the lab. Moreover, the model is used in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and the flow pattern in the anaerobically digested tank is simulated.

The flow in water and wastewater treatment system is simulated by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method. The analysis focusing the problematic phenomena contributes the problem solving.

Warm air heated by solar energy dries regenerated fuel, wastewater, and wasted sludge.