Sharif Digital Repository

During the brewing process, beer alternately goes through different chemical and biochemical reactions and solid–liquid separation stages. The clarification at the final step of brewing is a highly critical stage when it comes to producing a clear and bright beer. Recently, membrane technology has been successfully used in beer clarification, wherein Kieselguhr (diatomaceous earth) filtration is replaced by cross-flow microfiltration. The most important disadvantages of using microfiltration in clarification of beer is the fouling and flux decline during the process. The phenomenology of fouling mechanisms is still undefined and selection of an appropriate technique for flux enhancement in... 

Low frequency (LF) O2 plasma was used to modify the surface of polysulfone (PSF) gas separation membranes. The effect of treatment time and plasma power input on the membranes was also investigated. Pure CO2 and CH4 gas permeation measurements were performed before and after plasma treatment. The results showed the increase of permeability of the treated membranes due to surface ablation and surface polarization. However, the CO2/CH4 permselectivity of the treated membranes varied from 7.7 to 45.3 depending on the treatment conditions. Attenuated total reflection-Fourier transform infrared (ATR-FTIR) spectroscopy determined the introduction of oxygen containing polar groups on the surface... 

Production of cellulosic ethanol from lignocellulosic biomass represents a alternative to the petroleum fuel due to its renewable nature and sustainable availability. The major strategy used for cellulosic ethanol production includes three main steps of biomass pretreatment, enzymatic hydrolysis and ethanol fermentation. The enzymatic hydrolysis contributes significantly to the cost of cellulosic ethanol and from the process economics perspective, the improvement in the enzymatic hydrolysis step is a prerequisite. The fiber is composed of cell wall fractions and residual starch which can be hydrolyzed to reducing sugar.A method of hydrolysis of polysaccharides in corn fiber, feed... 

In the present work a comprehensive mathematical model has been developed for CFD simulation of transport phenomena in the hollow fiber membrane contactors. The system which has been studied was a gas sweetening including methane, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen sulfide in the gas phase and MEA aqueous solution as the solvent. Effects of temperature distribution on the contactor efficiency predicted taking into account the heat of solution, the heat of reaction, and the viscous dissipation. Major focus of the present study was on dynamic behavior of the contactor considering the entrance regions of momentum, energy, and mass transfers. CFD methods have been developed to solve the nonlinear... 

A kind of novel nanofiltration membrane process is proposed to solvent recovery from dewaxed lube oil stream in an energy-saving way. Most of the nanofiltration membrane materials are polymeric and cannot survive harsh conditions, for example, MEK contained solvents. Hence, high solubility of most of the polymeric materials in the solvent, especially in the MEK, is a challenge to researchers. To prepare a polymeric membrane that can solve the problem integrally skinned polyaniline (PAni) membrane was cast on a woven polyester backing material, and then crosslinked in two different ways, chemically and thermally, to make the membrane resistant in MEK (methyl ethyl ketene) and toluene for long... 

In this project dynamic effect of changes in gas turbine load on power plant, reforming and Co2 capture section is investigate. The reason for study of effects change of gas turbine load is that gas turbine determines the performance of the other parts in combined cycle including gas cycle and change of gas turbine load can alter the load and the performance of other parts in the power plant and in other process such as production of synthesis gas and carbon dioxide separation unit. One Autothermal reactor and eight sewgs reactor are utilized to produce gas turbine fuel which is mainly consist of Hydrogen. this part of thesis is to be implemented in the gPROMS from process system enterprise... 

Zeolite membranes are of interest due to their special properties; thermal and mechanical resistances and non-plasticization property in gas separations. Therefore, separation of H2S from natural gas by these membranes is the main goal of this thesis which is not investigated in the world. After some theoretical investigations including diffusion mechanisms of gases in the zeolites and adsorption mechanism of H2S on the zeolites, pure silica CHA-type (Si-CHA) zeolite was selected. After successful synthesis of Si-CHA zeolite, adsorption isotherms of H2S, CO2, and CH4 on the Si-CHA zeolite were measured over pressure range of 0-190 kPa and temperatures of 25 °C, 50 °C, and 75 °C. Acid gases... 

Due to the environmental concern for the harmful effect of the release of HFCs on global warming there has been more interest for the use of hydrocarbons as refrigerants in recent years. In this project the performance of these refrigerants have been studied and compared with common refrigerants from the quantitative and qualitative point of view using a real-scale model of Peugeot-405 air conditioning system. Charging amount, inside temperature, cooling load, energy consumption of cycle, coefficient of performance and required time to steady state condition are the important comparative criteria for such a study. After carrying out a series of tests it has been considered that charge... 

Considering the drastical increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, especially carbon dioxide, reduction of these gases seems necessary to combat global warming. Fossil fuel power plants are one of the main sources of CO2 emission. In this paper, CO2 capture from a natural gas fired steam cycle power plant using oxy-fuel combustion technology is studied. The Integrated Environmental Control Model (IECM) developed by Carnegie Mellon University was used to evaluate the effect of this capture technology on the plant efficiency and economic parameters of the system. Since the oxygen production plant, CO2 capture and transport are cost and energy intensive, the cost of electricity generated... 

Through our work, we conducted a three-stage solution to effectively reduce the impact of 'concentration polarization' and 'fouling' on ultrafiltration process. The stages were compromise of: 1. the design and selection of appropriate equipment along with outlining the operational parameters, 2. the pretreatment process design, and 3. the cleaning process design. Because of the presence of fat, there are incline both in permeate flux and the quality of the final product. Therefore, we studied the different methods of removing the lipid content, during pretreatment stage. After examining these methods, finally, we found that adding chitosan parallel with employing centrifugal separator is the... 

Oxygen enriched combustion is one of the attractive combustion technologies to control pollution and improve combustion in diesel engines. In the present work after an introduction to membrane seperation and membrane seperators for oxygen-nitrogen from air, a simulation of combustion chamber by GT-Power and membrane COMSOL Multiphysics was used to study the impact of oxygen enrichment on combustion, pollution and performance parameters with 23, 25 and 27% levels of enrichment. Increasing the oxygen engine content with the air leads to faster burn rates and the ability to burn more fuel at the same stoichiometry. These effects have the potential to decrease specific fuel consumption and... 

Olefin/ paraffin separation is one of the most important processes in the petrochemical industries.In the last decades, adsorption and membrane processes are a new technology considered significantly for this purpose. In order to synthesizeof zeolite powder (pure silica zeolite STT and CHA), raw materials were made by two methods and their HNMR spectrum was recorded and thenzeolite powder was synthesized. X ray diffraction(XRD) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images were taken,showing the same results as the refference structure.To consider synthesized zeolite powdersand olefin/ paraffin interactions, surface adsorption ofthose gases was accomplished on two zeolite powders. After... 

In this study, the effects of treatment time and power of Low-frequency (LF) O2 plasma has been investigated for the surface treatment of polyethersulfone (PES) gas separation membranes. PES membranes prepared using dry/wet phase inversion using ternary mixtures containing 1-methyl-2-pyrrolidone (NMP) as solvent, water as non-solvent. The optimum polymer concentration was 32 wt.% , 61 wt.% and 7 wt.% for PES,1-methyl-2-pyrrolidone and water respectively. Pure CO2 and CH4 gas permeation measurements were performed before and after plasma treatment. After treatment gas permeances of around 0.81 GPU for CO2, and 0.073 GPU for CH4 with selectivities of around 11.23 for CO2/CH4 were obtained.... 

In this study production of bioethanol from corn fiber that is a lignocellulosic material is investigated. Experiments were performed in a membrane bioreactor. Bioethanol is a second generation biofuel that is considered recently because of the decrease in oil production and pollutions caused by fossil fuels.The feed was corn fiber which is considered suitable due to its low cost and availability in my country. Corn fiber is composed of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin. We should increase cellulose fraction by pretreatment methods to get a higher conversion rate into bioethanol. We did this by acid pretreatment and the fraction was reached to 41%. In most of previous work experiments were... 

The consumption of fossil fuels (oil, gas and coal) increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that cause increase of earth atmosphere temperature and lots of environmental problems. Using appropriate alternative energy sources is one way to control this emission, while considering energy infrastructures shows this is a far solution. An early way for decreasing the emission of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is injection of CO2 in geological formations. Since approximately 50 years ago some researches in this area have been developing. The most important limit of these projects is its costs so it is wise to combine them with gas injection projects in gas and oil... 

Nowadays, radical increase in energy consumption guides humankind to find and harvest some alternative energy resources. Between the energy resources that have ever been known, Solar Energy is the most traditional one and Solar Water Heaters (SWHs) are the most ancient tools that have been used to store this energy up to now. Regarding this issue, many researches have been done to investigate different aspects of SWHs and the most conventional type was Thermosyphon SWH system. In this study, our aim is to investigate the influence of Pulsating Heat Pipes (PHPs) application as a heat transfer tool to convey absorbed solar energy to hot water reservoir of a SWH. In order to do this research,... 

The aim of this research is to model the separation and transport of multi-component gas mixture through a nanoporous membrane by using pore network models (PNM).
The first part of this project represents the membrane simulating by means of the PNM. A three-dimensional network is used to represent the membrane’s pore space and it consists of two parts; pore and throat. The pores are the main parts of the network and their diameter is characterized according to the pore size distribution of the membrane. Every throat connects two pores and the number of throats which is connected to each pore is named "coordination number". Using a variety size of pores and throats leads to production of... 

In this study the kinetics of extraction of various hydrocarbons from crude oil using supercritical CO2 has been studied experimentally. The effect of parameters such as temperature (35, 45, 55, 65 °C), pressure (90, 110, 130, 150 bar), initial volume of crude oil (16, 19, 22, 25 mL) were investigated. Flow rate of gas has been recorded dynamically. QUALITECH 4 and MATLAB neural network softwares have been used for designing the experiments and modeling the final results, respectively. Pressure has a direct effect on extraction yield and by increasing it, heavier fractions could be obtained. On the other hand, the effect of temperature is more complicated, by increasing the temperature, the... 

The purpose of the present project is to construct and improve the quality of an absorbable membrane using a supercritical process and study the effects of the operative parameters. Today, usage of biodegradable polymers is intensively increasing and these kinds of polymers are used as drug delivery carrier and tissue engineering medium. A biodegradable membrane is suitable for this goal. In this study Poly Ethylene Glycol (PEG) is used as the biodegradable polymer. Gas anti-solvent (GAS) method was applied for the production of the membrane. The used anti-solvent was Supercritical Carbon Dioxide. In order to study the effects of the operative parameters on the structure of the produced... 

The aim of this project is to achieve a semi permeable high flux membrane with a reasonable salt rejection for the treatment of low osmotic pressure water. A thin film composite membrane consists of three polymeric layers was studied in this project. These layers were polyester support, polysulfone sub layer and polyamine selective layer. The polyester support provides the mechanical resistance against the operating pressure. The polysulfone sub layer provides the suitable area for polyamide synthesize, and the polyamide layer is the selective active layer of membrane.
The resistance to water penetration in sub layer was reduced first and then, the pores in the polyamide layer refined by...