Ceramic nanofiltration membranes - examples of application and new developments

Ceramic NF membranes have been developed already 12 years ago followed by the commercialization by the company Inopor GmbH. A first plant containing 25 m 2 was installed already in 2002 with a first membrane replacement after 10 years operation in 2012 demonstrating the outstanding stability of the membrane. A lot of different applications have been realized in waste water treatment, product cleaning, biomass treatment as well as catalyst recovery. A few applications came up where the cut-off of the membrane was not sufficient or the flux of the membrane dropped down quickly because of pore blocking. Therefore new developments have been focusing on a further reduction of the cut-off. In addition efforts are aimed at the development of ceramic NF-membranes on monolithic substrates (honeycombs) with 10- 20 m 2/element in order to reduce the production costs by a factor 2-3.