Production of ultrapure water for pharmaceutical industry using an integrated system textile ion exchanger - membrane processes.

Water is a key element of all socioeconomic processes. Ultrapure water, with hardness less than 1 ppm, is currently widely employed in a variety of industries, including the semiconductor industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and electric power generation. To produce water with high-purity from well water, different purification methods such as thermal and membrane processes are performed. EDI is mainly used for ultrapure water production. Usually, this process is integrated with reverse osmosis (RO) to produce EDI feed water with a hardness of less than 1 ppm. In this study, ultrapure water was produced from a water well using a novel integrated UF- Ion Exchanger Textile (UF-IET)- electrodeionization (EDI) system. The UF IETTEXTILE permeate with a conductivity of 248 µS/cm was fed into the EDI cell to generate the ultrapure water. It has been revealed that the product conductivity decreased as the EDI current density increased and the feed velocity increased. The results obtained revealed that the suggested hybrid separation process UFIET/EDI system is an innovative solution for ultrapure water production with lower energy consumption and investment than the conventional RO/EDI system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]