Studies on treatment of textile industry wastewater through reverse osmosis membrane

Abstract

The buoyant Indian textile industry is one of the largest industries in the world and it is one of the major drivers of growth for the Indian economy and GDP. It constitutes approximately 14% of the industrial production and 17% of total export earnings. It is the second largest employment generator next to agriculture. Erode district is the hub of the textile industries in which more than ten thousand small and medium scale industries are functioning. The present work focuses primarily on the treatment of wastewater from textile dyeing and printing industries. In general, the textile dyeing sector may be broadly classified into four categories, namely woven fabric dyeing, knitted fabric dyeing, yarn dyeing and printing industries. The present investigation is concerned with the effluent treatment of all those four textile dyeing sectors, namely M/S Gangothri Textiles Limited for woven fabric dyeing industry, M/S Sakthi Knitting Limited for knitted fabric dyeing industry, M/S Vijaya Govinda Mills for yarn dyeing industry and M/S Unifront Process Limited for the printing industry. They are all located at SIPCOT, Perundurai, Erode district. In particular, the Reverse Osmosis (RO) membrane technology is used to treat and remove the level of TDS in wastewater. In RO membrane process, the selection of membrane plays a vital role. In the present work, membrane selection was carried out using commercially available software such as KOCH and ROSA for all the four industries. The selected membrane was tested in a lab scale before implementing it in real time studies. The data obtained from theoretical studies were tested in lab scale system (5 liters capacity). From the theoretical and lab scale test results, design and fabrication of real time studies of each textile industry was carried out. This was then compared with the experimental values. The overall performance of RO membranes is better in knitting and printing industries than in yarn dyeing segments and woven fabric dyeing units. newline newline newline