Experimental investigation of effective parameters on stability of emulsion liquid membrane for industrial wastewater treatment

There are a lot of concerns about minimizing the amount of industrial wastewater. Extraction and recovery of heavy metals from wastewater is more attractive than methods such as precipitation. Many researches had investigated the elimination of heavy metal ions from wastewater. Emulsion liquid membrane is one of the separation methods with high selectivity at low contaminant concentration. In this paper, application of emulsion liquid membrane for remove copper from waste water with concentration of 100 ppm is investigated. The effect of some parameters such as surfactant concentration and stirring speed and contact time on the separation performance are studied. The obtained optimum conditions are 0.6 mM for concentration of surfactant, 5 min the contact time and 300 rpm for stirring speed. This study can be useful for future new applications and innovations in the case of emulsion liquid membrane in many different industries such as petroleum and oil refinery.