How Does Hollow Fiber Membrane Work?

Hollow Fiber Membrane is a hollow fiber filtration mechanism that is engineered to maximize numerous long and permeable filaments varying from 1 to 3.5 mm wide and they are preserved in a PVC shell. Hollow fiber membrane was originally designed in the 1960s for reverse osmosis application. Now predominantly used in the treatment of water, production of medicine, desalination, tissue engineering, cell culture, etc.

How Does Hollow Fiber Membrane Work?

Hollow fiber membrane mechanism functions based on a similar principle to capillary or tabular configurations. In this case, we will choose a minute tube diameter to make it enables flexibility. In most technology developed, there are always challenges and hindrances faced by technology. The challenge of hollow fiber membranes is fiber breakage. Due to the flexible performance, the hollow fiber membrane will keep working under high strain, so the possibility of breaking is quite high. Unlike other configurations, they have a very high cost of operation. For this situation, we need to pay more attention when we choose a hollow fiber membrane supplier.

Filtration Membrane:

The filtration membrane is a type of membrane that consists of a thin layer of semi-porous material. It can disintegrate substances when we apply a propelling force to the membrane. These processes are usually using for the removal of particles, natural organic material, bacteria, and micro-organisms and it also has the mechanism to disseminate color, tastes & odors to water and cause a reaction with disinfectants which leads to the formation of byproducts disinfection. Membrane pore size is a great essential factor when we choose the different degrees of the membrane. According to the pore size, the membrane can group into three different types, which include microfiltration, nanofiltration, reverse osmosis & ultrafiltration.

Microfiltration:

Microfiltration can be referred to as a process that is engineered to perform a membrane separation process. This process needs to execute by using pore size ranging from 0.000003mm to 0.001mm, extremely low feed water operation pressure ranging from 100kpa to 400kpa and a molecular weight cut-off of more than 1,000,000 Daltons. This process can filter some substances includes silt, sand, clay, some bacterial species, etc.

Nanofiltration:

Compare to microfiltration, the nanofiltration process is using the nominal pore size of 0.0000001mm and molecular weight cut-off ranging from 1,000 to 100,000 daltons. For this process, if we want to be more function effectively, we need to increase significantly high operating pressure.

Reverse Osmosis:

This process has the capacity to efficiently filter almost all inorganic contaminants from water. This process can also efficiently filter natural organic substances, radium, pesticides, bacteria, etc. Most times reverse osmosis functions more efficient when employed in series with multiple units.

Ultrafiltration:

This process employs pore size ranging from 0.0000002 to 0.00001mm, operation pressure level ranging from 200 to 700kpa and molecular weight cut-off ranging from 10,000 to 100,000 daltons. Ultrafiltration has the capacity to filter all microbiological species, certain viruses, but this process is not an absolute solution to viruses and thematic substance.

Hollow Fiber Membrane Technique:

This technique employs the method of isolating a separate province of bacteria, unlike the most probable number procedure. We can check the turbidity of test tubes to see the purity of water. The hollow fiber membrane technique can not 100% clean wastewater, we still need to combine different system to eliminate micro-organism.