REMOVING HEAVY METAL IONS FROM INDUSTRIAL WASTE WATER THROUGH AFC99, AFC40 & CA202 MEMBRANE

Environment pollution has been found to be present widely in the environment. Among all pollutions, heavy metal pollution has become one of the most serious environmental problems today.. With the rapid development of industries such as semiconductors industries, fertilizer industries, metal plating facilities etc, the amount of heavy metal ions being discarded into their wastewater also increase tremendously. Unlike organic contaminants, heavy metals are not biodegradable and tend to accumulate in living organisms and many heavy metal ions are known to be toxic or carcinogenic. Toxic heavy metals of particular concern in treatment of industrial wastewaters include zinc, copper, nickel, mercury, cadmium, lead and chromium. This is why the treatmentof heavy metals is of special concern due to their recalcitrance and persistence in the environment.In this project, we are looking specifically at semiconductors industries and the heavy metals which are present in the wastewater are copper, zinc and aluminum.
In recent years, various methods for heavy metal removal from wastewater have been extensivelystudied. This paper reviews the current methods that have been used to treat heavy metal wastewaterand evaluates these techniques as well as looking into the new technique which is the Reverse Osmosis method in semiconductor industries.This proposal outlines the experimental study to determine the efficiency of reverse osmosis membrane in removing heavy metal ions from wastewater at semiconductor industry. Three operating condition will be varied in the experiment: Pressure, pH value and concentration of the feed versus the flux. At the same time, the total dissolved solids (TDS), conductivity, turbidity and Trans-membrane pressure (TMP) will be tested for each parameters with four different types of membrane which are AFC99, AFC40 and CA202 to determine the membrane’s efficiency. Low value of total dissolved solids (TDS), conductivity, turbidity and trans-membrane pressure (TMP) concludes to high efficiency of the membrane in removing the heavy metal ions from wastewater treatment.