A week with FoMD

Dear Diary,

Last week I met the dreamiest lab setup.  It has two pumps, two flow-meters, a hot AND a cold bath, and tubes in all the right places.  It’s enough to make any budding young engineer swoon.  I got to spend a whole week with this lab setup and it prefers to go by Fouling of Membrane Distillation (FoMD).  It took me some time to get to know the intricacies of FoMD but I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.  Looking at the picture that FoMD posed for me we can see that the right side has a container in styrofoam; this is the hot and salty side of FoMD.  The water on the right gets pulled through a pump and into the top part of the membrane cell.  The water then goes to a flow-meter and back to the hot and salty container.  The left side of FoMD is cool and clean.  The water from the large container gets pulled through a pump, goes through the bottom of the membrane cell, through a flow-meter, and back to the cool and clean container.  The middle picture shows the inside of the cell with the top portion on the left and the bottom on the right; the right picture shows the heart of FoMD – err, the membrane, within the cell.  The membrane is a hydrophobic (but Chayphilic) plastic that is a quarter of a millimeter thick and full of pores that are 0.45 nm diameter.  The water from the hot, salty side of FoMD evaporates through these pores making FoMD gradually become full of cool, clean water.  This also means that the salty side of FoMD becomes even more saltier or more concentrated throughout the day – MEOW!

 

 

The objective of spending all my time with FoMD is to determine at what concentration of salt to water will the membrane lose effectiveness.  FoMD should be losing its effectiveness around 3x concentration, meaning it is three times saltier than when it started and three times more to my liking.  However, FoMD’s builder has been out of town all week and, Diary, you know how wild experiments are when their builders are gone.  FoMD has certainly been crazy: producing erratic data, finding new locations to leak through, not keeping a constant flux, and providing a lot of membranes with holes in them.  I know they say to like an experiment for its qualities, love an experiment for its flaws but, Diary, I am not looking for a fix-up project.

That’s about it.  Until next week, Diary. – Chay

16 thoughts on “A week with FoMD”

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