Journal of Membrane Science 211 (2003) 5970

Optimisation and graphical representation of multi-stage membrane plants

Ken R. Morison , Xin She
Department of Chemical and Process Engineering, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand Received 4 May 2002; accepted 7 August 2002

Abstract A procedure is given for the design and optimisation of continuous multi-stage membrane plants using the example of whey ultraltration. During the design stage, the number of stages, area per stage, dialtration water ratios and possible pressures can be varied to minimise capital and operating costs. The concept of an optimal or ideal plant was developed to provide a basis for comparison for the designs. To interpret the results, and check the validity of the optimisation results, a variety of graphical representations were developed. Graphical proles of purity versus total solids, and of protein concentration versus lactose concentration were effective when interpreting design results and a graph of component mass ux helped identify yield losses. These and other graphs provided insight into the designs and often enable sensible improvements to them. 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Multi-stage; Graphical; Design; Membrane; Optimisation

1. Introduction The design of batch and multi-stage membrane plants is well established in the commercial world and equations for the design of plants have been well documented [13]. Some efforts have been made to analyse and optimise multi-stage plants. Niemi and Palosaari [4] simulated multi-stage reverse osmosis and ultraltration plants. Qi and Henson [5] gave a method for optimisation of gas separation in multi-stage spiral-wound plants by mixed integer non-linear programming (MINLP). A similar technique [6] was used for the design of reverse osmosis networks.
Corresponding author. Tel.: +64-3-364-2578; fax: +64-3-364-2063. E-mail address: k.morison@cape.canterbury.ac.nz (K.R. Morison).

Although much of a design can be theoretical, it is very dependent on the equation for permeate ux which is normally obtained empirically for the particular solution, membrane and operating conditions used. As a result optimality cannot be theoretically proven for a general case and results from one design are not necessarily true for another. The development of spreadsheets, such as Microsoft Excel, with built in optimisation programs, such as Solver, bring to the engineers desktop the capability for fast and accurate calculation of plant designs. The result of such calculations, however, can be a mass of numbers and a design, of which the validity and optimality is uncertain. The uncertainty is likely to increase with the number of variables, e.g. when there are many stages and when dialtration is used to achieve high purity in the product.

0376-7388/02/$ see front matter 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 3 7 6 - 7 3 8 8 ( 0 2 ) 0 0 3 7 5 - 7

60

K.R. Morison, X. She / Journal of Membrane Science 211 (2003) 5970

Nomenclature A C J k m membrane area (m2 ) concentration as mass fraction ux (kg m2 h1 ) constant mass (kg)

2. Design procedures 2.1. Design objective The objective of the design depends on the separation required, but a number of features are likely to be common. A membrane separation is likely to be specied by mass or volume throughput, feed composition and required product concentration, yield and/or purity. As examples, the products from the ultraltration of whey are usually specied in terms of concentration and purity of the retentate, whereas the products of ultraltration of a hydrolysate may be specied as yield in the permeate only. The design objective then becomes one of designing a process to obtain the specied separation using membranes with known ux and retention behaviour such that the overall prot is maximised. The overall prot depends on a number of variables but many such as labour and maintenance costs are not directly related to the design. The variable costs inuenced by the design include: membrane purchase and replacement; stagewise capital costs; pumping energy cost; loss of yield; plant water costs; CIP costs (plant volume based); downstream processing costs.

Greek symbols density (kg m3 ) retention coefcient dialtration ratio Subscripts des design D dialtration F feed j component j P permeate R retentate spec specied

Two additional methods of analysis are proposed for the design of membrane plants. One is an assessment of an ideal design. The ideal design can be one that is produced to meet a specied objective with only the constraints of the separation and possibly without any economic optimisation. In membrane design, one ideal design could be the plant with the minimum possible membrane area for the specied separation. There are analogies in chemical engineering, such as the ideal tubular reactor which gives the lowest volume for a reactor, and a distillation column with perfect tray efciency and total reux that gives the maximum possible separation of volatile mixtures [7]. The other feature proposed is the graphical representation of the results of the design to enable visual assessment of the design and comparison between designs. There are numerous examples in chemical engineering, such as the McCabeThiele distillation diagram [8] and the graphical analysis of heat exchanger networks [9]. In this paper, some of the equations for design are reviewed and methods of calculation are formally presented. Some concepts of optimal design are developed and a number of methods for the representation of these designs are given.

To optimise the process many design variables and operating can be changed. The process temperature strongly inuences the design but it is likely to be set to the maximum allowed by either the membrane or product so as to maximise the ux. Other design variables include: number of stages; arrangement of stages within a plant; arrangement of vessels within a stage; area per stage; dialtration ratio to each stage; plant pressures.

Within the design process there are also some additional objectives. The designer may want to: see if the design is sensible; obtain insight for innovation;

K.R. Morison, X. She / Journal of Membrane Science 211 (2003) 5970

61

obtain a measure of the sensitivity of the design to process parameters; determine the feasible operating envelope of the design; differentiate between different designs with similar optima; maximise the operating exibility of the plant when built. 2.2. Equations The basic layout for a general membrane stage with stage recirculation is shown in Fig. 1. It is assumed that the rate of recirculation is sufciently high that the composition within the recirculation loop is uniform and equal to the retentate composition. A system of equations can be dened for the steady state operation of a single ultraltration stage, as shown in Fig. 1, which includes the overall mass balance (1), the retention relation (2), the component mass balances (3), the permeate ow relationship (4) and the dialtration ratio (5): FF = FR + FP FD CP,j = CR,j (1 j ), CF,j = for each component j (1) (2)

FD = FP

(5)

R FR CR,j + P FP CP,j , F F F for each component j (3) (4)

FP = f (CR,j , T )A

where is the retention coefcient, the density (both of which may be a function of the concentrations), F the volumetric ow rate, C the mass fraction, A the membrane area, the stage dialtration ratio, subscripts F, R, P, D refer to feed, retentate, permeate and dialtration, and subscript j refers to component j. This set of equations can be used for each of many stages. The equations from this apply to most batch and continuous membrane plants except plants that do not have any recirculation, e.g. single-pass reverse osmosis. A difculty with these equations is that they depend on the retentate composition and only implicitly on the feed composition. Thus, to solve them, the retentate composition must be known or guessed, but this problem is easily overcome by using the equation solving capabilities of an optimisation program, such as Solver in Microsoft Excel. The ux relationship (4) must be obtained from plant tests but it is well known that the function depends strongly on pressure, temperature, composition and fouling, and is not at all straightforward to obtain. However, for design purposes, only an estimate of the worst case is required, probably an equation relating ux to composition in a fouled plant operating at the lowest acceptable ow rate and at a nominal plant pressure. As indicated by Eq. (5), a dialtration ow can be added to any stage to aid the ushing out of permeable components thus giving a higher purity of non-permeable components in the retentate, or a high yield of the permeable components in the permeate.

Fig. 1. One stage of a membrane plant with retentate recirculation.

62

K.R. Morison, X. She / Journal of Membrane Science 211 (2003) 5970

The dialtration uid is normally the solvent (usually water) added fresh to each stage as cross-current [10]. Very often the dialtration uid is pure demineralised water and will be referred to as dialtration water here. If the dialtration uid is not pure solvent, Eq. (3) must be modied to include the components in the dialtration ow. The overall dialtration ratio, overall , is expressed as the ratio of the total dialtration ow to the feed ow: stages 1 to n FD,i overall = (6) FF Often a low overall dialtration ratio is desired as this gives a lower cost for the demineralisation of the dialtration water and for downstream processes for the permeate. To solve the system, the temperature and functions for retention coefcients, density and ux need to be specied. Normally variables, such as the feed ow rate, feed composition, retentate total solids, retentate purity, dialtration ratio and area might be specied and the remaining variables that must be solved for are other ow rates and mass fractions. A more specic example is given later in the algorithm.

3. Design preliminaries A number of different plant congurations are proposed by various authors [10] but for most continuous multi-stage processes there is little option but to have a number of stages in series. Stages in parallel can generally be considered as just one large single stage. As stated above, dialtration can be arranged as cross-current or counter-current. It is difcult to optimise the plant structure as this requires a mixed integer non-linear programming approach [5] that is difcult to solve. If various plant and dialtration congurations seem possible, each may need to be optimised and then optima compared, in which case analysis of the sensitivity and exibility of the designs is very useful. An optimisation of the transmembrane pressure is possible but often it is constrained by the maximum cross-ow pressure drop and by the maximum transmembrane pressure drop of the membrane used. At the maximum cross-ow pressure drop, the cross-ow

velocity is highest so the ux is maximised and the fouling minimised. If there is sufcient information on the effect of cross-ow velocity and transmembrane pressure on fouling and ux, together with equations for cross-ow pressure drops [11], the pressures, and hence cross-ow velocity and power consumption, can be optimised [12]. However, such information is difcult to obtain and it is likely that the cross-ow pressure drops will be constrained at their maximum or taken from experience. Thus, cross-ow pressure drop, cross-ow velocity and power consumption do not form part of the design optimisation in this paper. A related issue, in the case of spiral-wound membranes, is the number of membrane elements to be placed in series in a vessel [13]. The optimisation of this again depends on the ux characteristics of the membrane and the product, and does not form part of this paper. One of the design problems is the determination of the ow rate of dialtration water to add to each stage. Conventional wisdom is that the amount of water is minimised if it is added where the retentate concentration is high. However, high concentrations also give lower uxes so more area may be required to remove the dialtration water at these low uxes. For a general case, an overall optimisation is required to balance lower uxes with the lower amount of water used. In the optimisation a particular pattern of dialtration should not be assumed. 3.1. Objective function The objective function, J, for the optimisation can be a combination of the costs that can be inuenced by design, in this case a combination of membrane area, dialtration costs and product losses: objective function = k1 A + k2 VD + k3 mlosses (7)

where A is the membrane area, VD the annual volume of dialtration water, mlosses the annual mass of lost product, and k1 , k2 and k3 the constants. Wagner [13] gives the replacement cost per square metre of polysulfone UF membranes at US$ 2550, RO membranes US$ 1525 and NF membranes US$ 2040. Typically the lifetime of the membrane is about 2 years giving an annual cost of up to US$ 25 m2 . The cost of dialtration comes from both the supply cost and downstream processing costs. If the permeate

K.R. Morison, X. She / Journal of Membrane Science 211 (2003) 5970

63

is concentrated by evaporation or reverse osmosis, there is an associated energy and capital cost. The installed capital cost of a falling lm evaporator is given by Fincham and Jebson [14] as about 20,000F0.46 in US$, where F is the evaporation ow in kg h1 . The energy cost for a typical evaporator will be in the order of US$ 10 t1 of steam with an evaporation efciency of 10 t of evaporation per tonne of steam giving US$ 1 t1 of evaporation. If say, the permeate ow is 50,000 kg h1 without dialtration, the incremental capital (discounted over say 7 years) and energy cost of adding dialtration water can be calculated to be about US$ 2 m3 of dialtration water. Some preliminary calculations show that this could be reduced to US$ 0.50 m3 with appropriate preconcentration by RO. In addition, the cost of supply of dialtration water might be US$ 0.50 m3 . The cost of mass losses can be very difcult to quantify with certainty. It is dependent on the retention coefcient of the desired product. In the case of protein ultraltration, lost protein is that which passes into the permeate and much of it is likely to be protein fragments. Accurate estimation of losses for the purpose of design optimisation depends on accurate retention data. Unless there is sufcient reliable data yield losses should not be added to the objective function. Otherwise the conclusions may be artefacts of incorrect assumptions rather than of the real behaviour. For this study, the values used for k1 and k2 were US$ 25 m2 and 1.50 m3 , respectively, but the value of k3 was set to zero. At all stages in the optimisation these values were just used as a basis from which to obtain insight into the optimisation of the design. For the purposes of obtaining a spreadsheet solution, constraints were added to the optimisation. They are that the feed and retentate compositions, and the feed ow rate is the specied throughput of the plant. It was found that these non-linear constraints were best applied as a penalty function added to the objective function. Thus, the objective function became: objective function
n

where subscripts des and spec refer to those from the design and specied, and the sum is over n components in the feed. The penalty function weightings, k4 and k5 , were set to about 106 but varied as necessary to obtain solutions that are sufciently close to the constraints. The variables of the optimisation were the area of each membrane, the dialtration ratio for each stage (Eq. (5)), the retentate ow rate and composition. An algorithm was developed to set up and solve the model. 1. Dene the feed composition and ow rate, and the required retentate total solids and purity. 2. Obtain equations or constants to describe ux (4), retention coefcients (2) and densities. 3. Set the number of stages and guess the optimisation variables: area per stage and the stage dialtration ratios. 4. Guess the solution variables: retentate ow rate and composition. A good guess can be obtained from the desired retentate total solids content and purity. 5. For each stage from the last (using the composition and ow in step 4) to the rst: 5.1. Calculate CP for each component using (2), FP using (4), FD using (5), FF using (1) and CF for each component using (3). 5.2. Calculate the total solids (TS) and purity of the retentate from the stage. 5.3. Set CR and FR from the next upstream stage to the calculated values of CF and FF . 6. Dene and calculate an objective function to minimise, e.g. a weighted sum of area and total dialtration ow rate (6). 7. Dene and calculate a penalty function for the deviation of compositions and ow rates from the desired values, e.g. a weighted sum of normalised squared deviations. Add this to the objective function (7). 8. Minimise the total objective function (e.g. using Excel Solver) by changing the stage areas, dialtration ratios, and guessed retentate ow rate and composition. While results are relatively easy to obtain, the validity of those results and innovation based on them is difcult. The optimisation may have over 20 variables and in the feasible domain many local optima are possible.

= k1 A + k2 FD + k4
j =1

CF,des,j CF,spec,j CF,spec,j

+k5 (FF,des FF,spec )2

(8)

64

K.R. Morison, X. She / Journal of Membrane Science 211 (2003) 5970

3.2. Ideal design A rst useful step to determine the validity of a design is the development of an ideal design against which the others can be compared. There is an analogy between membrane plants and reactors. A batch reactor gives the highest rate of reaction of species of any type of reactor, while a continuously stirred tank reactor has a slower rate of reaction because the concentration in the reactor is as low as that in the product and the rate of reaction is correspondingly low [15]. The conversion of a batch reactor can be achieved using a theoretical plug ow tubular reactor which, for a given ow rate, has the minimum volume. It can be shown that an innite series of innitely small stirred tank reactors achieves the same conversion in the same volume as a tubular reactor. A nite series of batch reactors has a lower conversion for the same volume. In a batch membrane plant, the membrane area required for a given time-averaged throughput is less than any continuous plant because the concentration is as low as it can be at any stage of the process and ux is thus a maximum. In contrast, in a continuous membrane plant with high recycle (Fig. 1) the concentration is the same as that required in the product and the ux and throughput are correspondingly low. Higher throughput for a given membrane area can be obtained by using a series of membrane stages to increase the concentration stagewise. The theoretical efciency of a batch plant can be matched by an ideal continuous plant with an innite number of small stages each with a high cross-velocity. With such a plant the concentration in any stage is as low as it can be and the ux is maximised. Exceptions to this are those membrane processes in which the ux does not continuously decrease as concentration increases. For design purposes, an ideal plant can be closely approximated by a continuous plant with a nite but large number of stages. 3.3. Case study For the purpose of demonstrating some of the ideas presented here a case study of the ultraltration of an idealised whey was examined. A feed of 50,000 kg h1 of ideal whey contains 5% lactose and 0.65% protein. A retentate product is required with a purity of 95%,

and 25% total solids. (With only two components a high purity is possible.) The retention coefcients of the protein and lactose are 0.98 and 0.10, respectively. With the maximum acceptable amount of fouling the ux, J, in l m2 h1 is given by: J = 10 log10 0.33 CR,prot (9)

where CR,prot is the mass fraction of protein in the retentate. To prevent high viscosity the retentate protein fraction should not exceed 25%. The maximum stage dialtration ratio is limited to 80%.

4. Graphical representation of the designs To show features of the designs a number of different graphical representations are proposed. The rst is a plot of the product purity versus total solids content of the retentate. Fig. 2 shows this prole for an ideal design for about 240 stages of 10 m2 each, for case study one, and also includes the curve for a plant with no dialtration. We see from this that without dialtration the desired product purity cannot be achieved and in this case 71% dialtration in each stage (see Eq. (2)) was found to be optimal. The same data is also represented by Fig. 3 showing the protein concentration versus the lactose concentration. This more clearly shows the distinction between ultraltration (UF) and dialtration (DF).

Fig. 2. Proles of purity vs. total solids in the ideal plant with and without dialtration.

K.R. Morison, X. She / Journal of Membrane Science 211 (2003) 5970

65

Fig. 3. Prole of composition in the ideal plant with and without dialtration.

However, neither graph offers an assurance that the overall dialtration strategy found is optimal. Examination of different scenarios shows that there is a trade-off between the cost of area and dialtration water in the optimisation. This is shown in Fig. 4. From Fig. 4 it can be seen that, for the case study, the membrane area cost is only weakly related to the overall dialtration ratio and that the most variable cost is that of dialtration water. In a real design, a safety margin of perhaps 10% might be added to the minimum membrane area offering a plant that could

be operated over a range of dialtration ratios and/or at a pressure lower than the pressure used for the design ux. In this case and in others tested, a small amount of extra area provides a large amount of freedom for the dialtration ratios used in plant operation. A real design must have a practical number of stages, the number of which can be optimised. At this point we should add to the objective function a cost for the equipment required in each stage. Typically a sanitary pump, isolating valves, a permeate ow meter, a dialtration water control valve, some additional automation and some plumbing are required. The cost of this is at least US$ 10,000 per stage which can be annualised by using a capital cost recovery factor or a payback time. Here a simple payback time of 5 years is used and thus the additional annualised cost of each stage is about US$ 2000. The cost of vessels and processing equipment for the feed and retentate is unaffected by the number of stages. If the stages costs are added to the objective function, the optimisation becomes a mixed integer non-linear program but because of the difculty of solving these, this is best avoided. It is perhaps better to state the optimisation as: nd the maximum number of stages at which the reduction in the overall cost achieved by adding one more stage is less than the cost of that stage. The design can be repeated for a number of different stages and the cost calculated with typical results as shown in Fig. 5.

Fig. 4. The effect of overall dialtration ratio on costs.

66

K.R. Morison, X. She / Journal of Membrane Science 211 (2003) 5970

Fig. 5. Optimisation of the number of stages.

The cost saving when the number of stages is increased from 9 to 10 is US$ 2400 but from 10 to 11 stages is only about US$ 850 per year which is less than the cost of US$ 2000 per year for an extra stage. It would seem, for this example, that the optimal number of stages is about 10. When the solution for a practical plant is optimised, the area for each stage is calculated. Again one has the problem of determining whether or not the solution obtained is sensible and critical. Firstly, the solution can be shown as composition proles as in Figs. 6 and 7 for plants with 4 and

10 stages. This shows that with 10 stages, the prole is better able to approach the prole of the ideal plant. It is also proposed that the membrane area of each stage be shown graphically. A graph, of which the integral is area, would give a visual impression. One possibility is a graph of the inverse of ux versus cumulative permeate ow through the stages, the integral of which is area (P. Dejmek, personal communication). When dialtration is used the cumulative permeate ow is affected by the dialtration ow and interpretation is more difcult. Instead, one could plot the ow rates

Fig. 6. Prole of purity vs. total solids for an ideal plant, a 4-stage plant, and a 10-stage plant.

Fig. 7. Composition proles for an ideal plant, a 4-stage plant, and a 10-stage plant.

K.R. Morison, X. She / Journal of Membrane Science 211 (2003) 5970

67

Fig. 8. Graphical representation of the area required to achieve a change in purity for an ideal plant (curve) and a four-stage plant (bars).

and ux of the permeate free of dialtration water giving a graph of 1/J(1 ) versus cumulative FP (1 ), the integral of which is also area. The current authors were unable to gain insight from either of these graphs. Another possibility is a graph of dA/d(purity) versus purity, the integral of which is area. For plants with stages of nite size, the graph is A/ (purity) for each stage versus purity. Fig. 8 shows such a graph for the ideal plant and a crudely designed four-stage plant.

Visually we can see that when the purity is either low or high more area is required to obtain a given change in the purity. By comparing the area under the graph in each section, it can be seen that the last stage of the four-stage design requires a lot more area than the ideal design. More stages are required to obtain areas similar to the optimal plant. Fig. 9 shows the same graph for a plant with 10 stages and it seems that the design appears sensible as the areas of the graphs are very similar.

Fig. 9. A 10-stage plant is much closer to the optimal plant.

68

K.R. Morison, X. She / Journal of Membrane Science 211 (2003) 5970

Fig. 10. Graphical representation of the area required to increase total solids content vs. total solids content.

In this example, there is also the objective of concentrating the solution. The same approach can be used to construct a graph of A/ C versus C (Fig. 10) but this is less clear when there is dialtration. It does show though that the area required to concentrate the product after the introduction of dialtration is much greater for the 10-stage plant than for the ideal plant. This suggests that a larger number of small stages in the dialtration section may be benecial, but when tried (not shown) this had little effect. The second peak that occurs when dialtration water addition is started

is the result of negligible change in concentration. This is best seen in Fig. 2 which shows that the total solids content actually drops at the start of dialtration. The membrane area at this point in the plant is thus used solely for purication rather than concentration. The combination of the Figs. 9 and 10 gives some condence that the 10-stage design is reasonable. Other variations in this approach are possible. For another application in which permeate yield was important [16], a graph of A/ (yield) versus yield gave additional insight.

Fig. 11. Component uxes of protein and lactose in a 10-stage plant.

K.R. Morison, X. She / Journal of Membrane Science 211 (2003) 5970

69

4.1. Mass ux The concept of component mass ux or ow can add another view of the process. For a particular component the mass ux, Jj , of that component is given by Eq. (10): Jj = CP,j FP A (10)

As concentration increases, the ux generally declines, but the change in the component mass ux depends on the component and membrane. The component mass uxes of protein and lactose from a 10-stage plant for case study one is shown in Fig. 11. The overall yield loss was calculated to be 14%. In this graph, the assumption of the constant retention coefcient for protein of 0.98 is almost certainly incorrect, and this graph will be very strongly affected by the assumption. Even without accurate data, this graph encourages one to think about loss reduction. With cheaper membrane costs, one could consider using a tighter membrane if the protein ux was reduced to a greater extent than the lactose ux. A graph such like Fig. 11 using real plant data could indeed inuence membrane replacement decisions.

5. Discussion The procedure and graphs shown here have been very useful when developing plant designs. The ideal plant design provided a basis for comparison and in Fig. 4 showed the sensitivity of the design costs to the overall dialtration ratio. This graph was useful in showing the relative insensitivity of cost to dialtration ratio, and it prevented an unnecessary search for a very precise optimum. Fig. 5 showed the diminishing returns from extra stages. This graph is quite sensitive to membrane and water costs and would have looked quite different if drawn using costs from 20 years ago. Figs. 6 and 7 show how the number of stages inuences the composition prole in the plant, but they do not quantify the effect of following a prole different from that of the ideal plant. However, Figs. 810 graphically show, from the graph area, the membrane area of the plant. The contrast between the 4- and 10-stage plants is much more obvious in Figs. 8 and

9 than in Figs. 6 and 7. Fig. 8 shows the regions of the plant that would be more effective with smaller stages, in this case the start and end, rather than the middle. Fig. 10 was less useful for the case study presented but it did provide ideas, albeit of no benet, for a modication to the design. For other plants involving only concentration without dialtration Fig. 10 may be more useful. In many cases the results given by the optimisation were not globally optimal. The results indicated that there were numerous local optima. Graphical comparison of the results with other plant designs and the ideal design, quickly indicated that better optima were likely to exist. One of the features shown in Fig. 2 is that dialtration can cause a decrease in the total solids level from one stage to the next within the plant. This is known as backup and is not considered desirable in a real plant. The difculty often is that the operator can monitor only the total solids within the plant, perhaps using a refractometer, as analysis of the composition takes longer. The operator must ensure that there is not potential for the total solids to exceed a maximum potentially causing high viscosity and blockage of the membranes. Operators nd it easier to operate a plant with no potential for backup. Most of the graphs shown can be used to monitor the operation of an existing plant to gain a better understanding of variations in the plant and opportunities for improvement. References
[1] R.G. Gutman, Membrane Filtration: The Technology of Pressure-Driven Cross-Flow Processes, Adam Hilger, Bristol, 1987. [2] J.A. Howell, Design of membrane systems, in: J.A. Howell, V. Sanchez, R.W. Field (Eds.), Membranes in Bioprocessing. Theory and Applications, Blackie, Glasgow, 1993. [3] R. Rautenbach, R. Albrecht, Membrane Processes, Wiley, New York, 1989. [4] H. Niemi, S. Palosaari, Flowsheet simulation of ultraltration and reverse osmosis processes, J. Membr. Sci. 91 (1994) 111124. [5] R. Qi, M.A. Henson, Optimal design of spiral-wound membrane networks for gas separations, J. Membr. Sci. 148 (1998) 7189. [6] N.G. Voros, Z.B. Maroulis, D. Marinos-Kouris, Short-cut structural design of reverse osmosis desalination plants, J. Membr. Sci. 127 (1997) 4768.

70

K.R. Morison, X. She / Journal of Membrane Science 211 (2003) 5970 [12] L.J. Zeman, A.L. Zydney, Microltration and Ultraltration, Marcel Dekker, New York, 1996. [13] J. Wagner, Membrane Filtration Handbook: Practical Tips and Hints, 2nd ed., revision 2, Osmonics Inc., Minnetonka, Minnesota, 2000. [14] A. Fincham, R.S. Jebson, Process Capital Cost Estimation for New Zealand, 1994, The Chemical Engineering Group, Wellington, 1994. [15] O. Levenspiel, Chemical Reaction Engineering, 2nd ed., Wiley, New York, 1972. [16] Y. Pouliot, M.C. Wijers, S.F. Gauthier, L. Nadeau, Fractionation of whey protein hydrolysates using charged UF/NF membranes, J. Membr. Sci. 158 (1999) 105114.

[7] R.E. Treybal, Mass-Transfer Operations, 3rd ed., McGrawHill, New York, 1980. [8] W. McCabe, E. Thiele, Graphical design of fractionating towers, Ind. Eng. Chem. 17 (1925) 605611. [9] T. Umeda, J. Itoh, K. Shiroko, Heat exchange system synthesis, Chem. Eng. Prog. 74 (1978) 70. [10] A.J. Merry, Membrane equipment and plant design, in: K. Scott, R. Hughes (Eds.), Industrial Membrane Separation Technology, Blackie, Glasgow, 1996, pp. 3266. [11] A.R. Da Costa, A.G. Fane, C.J.D. Fell, A.C.M. Franken, Spacer characterization and pressure drop modelling in spacer-lled channels for ultraltration, J. Membr. Sci. 87 (1994) 7998.