Parametric Study of Rupture Analysis for the Optimization of Stable Emulsion Liquid Membrane using DOE Approach

Rupture of the membrane is considered as one of the most critical characteristics while working on wastewater treatment via emulsion liquid membrane. This paper presents a decisive study of different parameters affecting the rupture of membrane. The potential parameters which are investigated in this study include, surfactant dosage, surfactant concentration, concentration of aqueous phase, emulsification velocity, ratio of organic to aqueous phases and ratio of membrane to feed phases. The Design of Experiment (DOE) approach was used to design the experiments and the results were analyzed statistically through a software Minitab-18. The study revealed that amongst all these parameters, two are the highly significant playing a crucial role in rupture of the membrane. These significant parameters are emulsification velocity and ratio of the organic to aqueous phase. Pareto chart being used as an effective statistical tool implied that the emulsification velocity and ratio of the organic to aqueous phase have negative and positive effects on the response respectively. Using the Response Optimizer tool, the optimum levels of all the potential parameters were statistically calculated followed by an experimental verification resulting a least minimum rupture of 36%. A statistical model was developed in this study and the values of predicted rupture were compared with the experimental results. The calculated correlation coefficient R2 of the developed model was 0.998 and the accuracy of correlation coefficient deduced that the developed model of rupture will precisely calculate the rupture over the range of values.