Technical Papers and Presentations

We present the progress of the simulation activity we are carrying out within the PURIFAST LIFE+ project. We first present the model we formulated to describe the macroscopic effects of the filtration process taking place in a multi-bore filter, focusing on the fouling phenomenon. In membrane-based filters the fouling phenomenon is the major reason of a decreasing filtration efficiency. Therefore, it is useful to simulate the long-term behavior of a filtration process in order to foresee the performance of the purification task. The model was firstly implemented in COMSOL considering a single cycle of filtration and a single cycle of back washing. The latter is the step of inverted flux imposed in the plant in order to clean the membrane. Then we converted these two COMSOL models in MATLAB functions, so that we implemented a MATLAB program calling these functions in an iterative way. Our results are in good agreement with experiments and they are promising for the incoming application in the framework of the PURIFAST project.