MEMBRANE DISTILLATION PROCESS AS SUPPLEMENTARY PURIFICATION OF OIL REFINING WASTEWATER IN ORDER TO INDUSTRIAL R EUSE - A CASE STUDY

Reduction of water resources and the increasing of industrial demand for optimal water quality especially in areas with water stress such as southern Iran in one hand and also given the stricter regulation of environmental standards for disposal of wastewater from refineries in the other hand, dictates the necessity of developing new technologies for further purification of customary treated industrial wastewater for reuse. Due to the unacceptable quality of most conventionally treated wastewater of refineries for reusing in industry, the need for additional purification steps is inevitable. Recently Membrane Distillation(MD), as a new membrane separation process is so attractive and taken into consideration. This new membrane technology has a lot of applications such as wastewater treatment, desalination for drinking and industrial use, solute removal, concentration, etc. and can be used in combination with other separation techniques such as reverse osmosis(RO), forward osmosis(FO), thermal distillation, crystallization and so on. Lawson and Lloyd(۱۹۹۷). Improving the MD process is being investigated by many researchers as an alternative to common separation methods such as distillation and reverse osmosis .Drioli et al.(۲۰۱۵).