Study of performances of ceramic microfiltration membrane from Tunisian clay applied to cuttlefish effluents treatment

Microfiltration membrane is increasingly used in wastewater treatment to produce a higer quality effluent. In this study a microfiltration membrane from Tunisian clay (JM18/SI2) was used to treat cuttlefish effluents generated from the conditioning (freezing and washing) seawater food industry which consume a great amount of water. In Sfax (Tunisia), about 1000 m3/day are usually discharged in the littoral. The prepared membrane is composed of two layers: a support (SI2) with a pore diameters centred near 6.3 µm and porosity of about 48.5%, and a microfiltration layer (JM18) with a mean pore size of 0.18 µm. Cross-flow microfiltration was carried out then, in order to reduce the pollutants content expressed in term of turbidity and dissolved organic carbon (DOC). Both industrial ceramic membrane from a-alumina and elaborated membrane from Tunisian clay were used for this study. The results reveal that the values of DOC retention rate and turbidity are nearly the same: about 65% and 1 NTU respectively. So, it seems that the prepared microfiltration membrane is suitable for this kind of waste water treatment.

In this work we have prepared a new microfiltration membrane using natural powders derived from Tunisian natural materials. One application of these membranes is the washing cuttle-fish effluent treatment. Nevertheless, these membranes can also be used as a support for ultrafiltration layer.