Hamid Reza Mortaheb

Study on a new surfactant for removal of phenol from wastewater by emulsion liquid membrane

Removal of phenol from wastewater using emulsion liquid membrane (ELM) is studied in present study. A new polyamine-type surfactant was synthesized and used for stabilizing of the emulsion phase. The results for the emulsion made by the synthesized surfactant showed much better stability and performance in the separation process compared to that by conventionally used Span 80. To determine the optimum operation conditions, the effect of several parameters such as emulsifier concentration, concentration of NaOH in the internal phase, oil to internal phase volume ratio, mixing intensity, temperature, solvent type, and stabilizer concentration have been investigated. It was found that under the optimum conditions, more than 98% of phenol can be removed in a single-stage process. The removal efficiency can be increased to 99.8% in a two-stage process.

Optimization of NMP extraction in 1, 3-butadiene production line

N-methylpyrrolidone is a powerful solvent for variety of chemical processes due to its vast chemical properties. It has been used in manufacturing processes of polymers, detergents, pharmaceuticals rubber and many more chemical substances. However, it creates large amount of residue in some of these processes which has to be dealt with. Many well known methods such as BASF in rubber producing units have tried to regenerate the solvent at the end of each run, however, there is still discarding of large amount of residue containing NMP, which over time, could cause environmental concerns. In this study, we have tried to optimize regeneration of the NMP extraction from butadiene production. It is shown that at higher temperatures NMP is separated from the residue with close to 90% efficiency, and the solvent residue proved to be the most effective with a 6: 1 ratio.