A New Approach for Determination of Neck-Pore Size Distribution of Porous Membranes via Bubble Point Data

Reliable estimation of the porous membranes neck-pore size distribution (NPSD) is the key element in the design and operation of all membrane separation processes. In this paper, a new approach is presented for reliable determination of NPSD of porous membranes using wet flow-state bubble point test data. For this purpose, a robust method based on the linear regularization theory is developed to extract NPSD of membranes from bubble point test data. The performance of the proposed method is tested using various experimental data. The predicted results clearly demonstrate that the proposed method can successfully predict the proper NPSD from a set of bubble point test data.