Study of overall mass transfer coefficients in a liquid membrane in Taylor flow regime: Calculation and correlation

Abstract

The use of a liquid membrane in Taylor flow regime is a recent technology, which extends and generalizes the definition of a membrane. It has been developed and tested for lactic acid removal. A challenge in understanding the technology is that the values of the overall volumetric mass transfer coefficients are not known, and it is unclear how they are related with the operational conditions. In this work, the overall volumetric mass transfer for the liquid membrane in Taylor flow was calculated from experimental results and three empirical models, two of which are from literature and one was developed in this work based on dimensional analysis. From combination of experimental results and the developed models the main variables (operational conditions) of the liquid membrane in Taylor flow that have a strong influence on the overall volumetric mass transfer coefficients (in the donor and in the membrane phase) were defined. The relative velocity results as the variable that has the largest influence on the performance of this new liquid membrane technology.