Mathematical modeling in water filtration

• Main Author: Muhammad Asyraaf Bin Mohd Yusri
• Other Authors: Ang Whye-Teong
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2024
• Subjects: Engineering; Water filtration
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/177345
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

A big part of the ecosystem and life requires water. 70% of the earth contains seawater. Humans not only need water but needs freshwater to survive. If the water is contaminated, people would get sick, and diseases may spread. Therefore, to filter water, people have invented the desalination process and there are subgroups in the process. A specific desalination process would be reverse osmosis. Reverse osmosis is one of the main ways people use to filter water today. However, when using the reverse osmosis process, one of two things will happen. Firstly, there would be more wastewaters produce than clean water, about 5:1 ratio. Secondly, when using the reverse osmosis process, it might filter out the good minerals that can have a good effect for the body. Hence, the main objective of the study is to analyze and create a better filter or filters to counter the issues raised. Creating a mathematical model for water filtration through a semi-permeable membrane is the goal of this project. We will derive a mathematical formulation for a convection- diffusion problem. To develop the model, partial differential equations are transformed into a set of algebraic equations that can be solved numerically with MATLAB. This is done by partitioning the solution domain into numerous smaller control volumes using FVM.