Transport Analysis of Reverse Osmosis of Organic Aqueous Solutions

Abstract

Reverse osmosis separations of alcohol aqueous solutions were performed over a wide range of feed concentrations up to 60 wt% using water-selective membranes. The validity of the nonequilibrium thermodynamics model by Spiegler and Kedem was confirmed theoretically and experimentally under the conditions of this study. The parameters of this model were found to have a large dependency on the feed alcohol concentration.