Computational Analysis of Citric Acid Pertraction in Emulsion Liquid Membranes

Citric acid is one of widely used acids in industry and its recovery from waste streams is critical. Emulsion liquid membrane is one of the most effective recovery methods, which has been investigated in recent years. Numerous transport phenomena parameters affect the efficiency of this process. From the process equipment design point of view, optimization based on overall cost is of great importance and important equipment sizing decisions/constraints must be considered. A physics-based model for a full-scale simulation of emulsion liquid membrane systems is very useful. This work is focused on developing and verifying such a model. A coupled particle/mixture simulation was carried out in this work and the modeling results were fitted on the experimental data. The model is capable of simulating similar systems with a reasonable accuracy.