Department of Chemical Engineering

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Research and technological developments are being pursued vigorously all over the world to reduce the cost of desalinated water. Thermal and membrane-based desalination processes are very well known and plants are being operated to augment the demand of fresh water essential for drinking in water-scarce countries and to sustain the industrial processes. Any further improvement in energy reduction can only be marginal considering the complexity of the desalination system. The alternative approach is to add value by recovering edible salt, rare and valuable metals, such as caesium, titanium, uranium and vanadium, from the reject brine streams. In this regard, a novel polymeric chelating resin was designed and developed in Desalination Division, BARC laboratory with significant potential for this achievement. In this paper, the characteristics and potential of the resin have been described for the recovery of valuable elements based on experimental findings. © 2010 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

World University root node

International Journal of Nuclear Desalination

Strategy of deriving 'wealth from waste' from concentrated brine of desalination plant

Process control is an essential part of the desalination industry that requires to be operated under optimum conditions to increase the lifetime of the plant and reduce the unit product cost. Improved process control is a costeffective approach to energy conservation and increased process profitability. The Multi-Stage Flash (MSF) plant involves many complicated operations related to steam, chemicals and seawater. These include variable capacity, slow dynamics, deadtime characteristics due to certain load changes, significant effects of small deviations from design conditions on plant operation, effects of power plant output conditions on the desalination plant, instability due to disturbances in steam supply and water temperature variations. Keeping in view the above criticalities, the selection of an effective control system becomes inevitable. This paper aims at identifying various types of control loop available in an MSF plant, selection of control elements, type of control strategy needed for it and integrating the whole system for supervisory control. © 2010 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Process control in Multi-Stage Flash desalination industry

The cost of product water is a key factor in determination of acceptability of any desalination system and plant. In case of Sea Water Reverse Osmosis plants, most of the energy consumed is in the form of electricity. The High Pressure Pump (HPP) is the single major energy consuming equipment with a share of above 75%. Hence reduction in energy consumed by HPP will have a substantial effect on the overall energy consumption. The high starting torque requirement of high pressure pump results in increased acceleration time of the motor which subsequently increases the strain on the upstream electrical system from motor feeder to transformer. Provision of a Variable Frequency Drive can be a solution for both the above problems. This paper studies the techno-economic feasibility of providing variable frequency drive for HPP motor at NDDP, Kalpakkam. © 2010 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Techno-economic feasibility study of providing Variable Frequency Drive for High Pressure pump, SWRO plant at NDDP, Kalpakkam

Composite polyamide membranes were prepared by the in-situ interfacial polymerization over polysulfone and polyethersulfone support membranes using three different amines namely, polyethylene imine, 1.4- phenylene diamine and piperazine with difunctional and trifunctional aromatic acid chlorides. Separation performances of the membranes were studied with respect to sodium chloride and magnesium sulfate solutes. The effect of pH of feed on composite membrane performances is also studied. Polyethylene imine and 1,4- phenylene diamine give reverse osmosis (RO) type membranes but piperazine gives nanofiltration (NF) type membrane over both polysulfone and polyethersulfone supports. Composite membranes formed over polyethersulfone supports show better salt rejecting properties with relatively less product permeation rate than that formed over polysulfone supports. Polyethylene imine based composite membranes show better performance at the acidic feed whereas 1,4- phenylene diamine and anhydrous piperazine based membranes showed better performance at the alkaline feed. © MD Publications Pvt. Ltd.

Journal of Polymer Materials

Preparation and separation performance studies on composite polyamide membranes using different amine systems and support membranes

This work was carried out under the specific collaboration agreement between the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) from India and the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique (CEA) from France. This paper summarises first results of review and research on the possible extraction of uranium from the concentrated brine rejected by integrated nuclear desalination systems, which both partners are currently developing in the two organisations. Three innovative and efficient methods of uranium extraction have been proposed: 1) Resin grafted with calixarene: this method has the advantage of very high selectivity. Its performances, especially for large-scale extraction, still need further R&D and optimisation; 2) Magnetic separations: yet another method with high selectivity, easy separation and affording high degree of material recovery. The method, however, is in developmental stage; 3) Canal system with Braid adsorbents: high selectivity. Appears to be feasible in conjunction with existing technology. It would nonetheless require large amounts of adsorbents and adequate infrastructure. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Desalination

Extraction of uranium from the concentrated brine rejected by integrated nuclear desalination plants

Indigenously developed polysulfone Ultrafiltration (UF) membranebased domestic and industrial water purification units were evaluated for their ability to filter bacteria and viruses from water. Escherichia coli (10 5 cfu/ml) and P1 phage (10 6 pfu/ml) were filtered through a Domestic Water Purifier (DWP) (dead-end UF unit) and a large-scale spiral water purifier (cross-flow UF unit) and the filtrates were analysed for bacterial and phage counts. Both units were found to be efficient in the complete removal of E. coli and a 99.99% removal of the P1 phage was observed. Both the domestic and industrial water purifiers are highly efficient in the removal of bacteria and viruses. UF membranes were also characterised for Molecular Weight Cut-Off (MWCO) by the polyethylene glycol and polyethylene oxide methods, which showed that MWCO was 60-65 kDa. These MWCO results were further validated using the Bovine Serum Albumin (BSA) rejection behaviour of these membranes, which showed about 90% rejection. The technique involving the estimation of MWCO, coupled with the rejection characteristics of E. coli and P1 phage, provides an excellent tool to evaluate the efficiency of water purifiers based on UF membrane technology. Copyright © 2009 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Evaluation of the efficiency of polysulfone ultrafiltration membrane-based water purifiers for microbiological decontamination

Composite polyamide membranes are prepared using in-situ interfacial polymerization using mixed amine system comprising 1,4-phenylene diamine and pipperazine. Separation performance of the membranes are studied as a function of the concentration of amine and acid chloride, the concentration ratio of the amines, nature of the acid chloride, and the presence of surfactant and acid acceptor in the aqueous reagent. The effect of esterification and hydrazide reactions involving residual carboxylic acid groups in the polymeric membranes on the co-polymeric composite membrane performance is also studied. The membrane performance can be tailored easily by conversion of the residual reactive functional groups in post-treatment.

Separation Science and Technology

Separation behavior of composite polyamide membranes from mixed amines: Effects of interfacial reaction condition and chemical post-treatment

The ocean contains around eighty elements of the periodic table and uranium is also one among them, with a uniform concentration of 3.3 ppb and a relative abundance factor of 23. With a large coastline, India has a large stake in exploiting the 4 billion tonnes of uranium locked in seawater. The development of radiation grafting techniques, which are useful in incorporating the required functional groups, has led to more efficient adsorbent preparations in various geometrical configurations. Separation based on a polymeric adsorbent is becoming an increasingly popular technique for the extraction of trace heavy metals from seawater. Radiation grafting has provided definite advantages over chemical grafting. Studies related to thermally bonded non woven porous polypropylene fiber sheet substrate characterization and parameters to incorporate specific groups such as acrylonitrile (AN) into polymer back bones have been investigated. The grafted polyacrylonitrile chains were chemically modified to convert acrylonitrile group into an amidoxime group, a chelating group responsible for heavy metal uptake from seawater/brine. The present work has been undertaken to concentrate heavy metal ions from lean solutions from constant potential sources only. A scheme was designed and developed for investigation of the recovery of heavy metal ions such as uranium and vanadium from seawater.

Fulltext

Nuclear Engineering and Technology

An engineering scale study on radiation grafting of polymeric adsorbents for recovery of heavy metal ions from seawater

Embryonic stem cells (ESCs) are culture-adapted pluripotent cells derived from the inner cell mass of the blastocyst-stage embryo. ESCs provide unique opportunities to study the molecular basis of the process of differentiation that gives rise to all the somatic cell types of the body, including cells of the cardiac lineages. Many protocols have been established to obtain cells of the cardiac lineage from ESCs in vitro. More recently, a clearer picture of the regulatory networks governing cardiac differentiation has begun to emerge. Herein, we summarize the current methods to obtain cells of the cardiac lineages from ESCs and present a review of the signaling pathways, transcription factors, and target genes involved in cardiac differentiation. © 2009 by Begell House, Inc.

Critical Reviews in Biomedical Engineering

Molecular aspects of cardiac differentiation in embryonic stem cells

In this paper we report the development of self-standing tubular geometry of aligned carbon nanotubes with very high surface area (∼ 90 m2/g). The synthesis involves spray pyrolysis of ferrocene-benzene solution in nitrogen atmosphere. The effects of temperature, ferrocene concentration, flow rate of nitrogen gas and the pumping rate of the liquid precursor were studied. The products were analyzed with transmission electron microscopy (TEM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and Raman spectroscopy. The optimum condition for formation of macro-tubular geometry was found to be 950 °C, 50 mg/ml ferrocene in benzene, 1.5 ml/min pumping rate of liquid precursor and 5 lpm of nitrogen gas flow rate. The length and the diameter of the macrotube were 5 cm and 1 cm respectively with a thickness of 120 μm. The authors intend to use this tube in separation technology. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.