Evaluation of the Influence of the Channel Curvature on the Flow Characteristics in the Channel of Spiral Wound Membrane Modules Using CFDOF

In the pressure driven membrane processes the flow characteristics have a significant influence on the intensity of mass transfer and concertation polarization, and also on the pressure drop in apparatuses. With the development of the information theologies, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods became the widely used technique for the analysis of the flow regularities in such systems. The object of this study is the fluid flow process in the channels of the membrane module. The subject of this study is the hydrodynamic parameters of the flow and the geometrical parameters of the channel. In the study, we compared of the flow characteristics, primarily the pressure drops, in the hypothetic channels of the spiral wound membrane modules, in the absence of a spacer, for the cases of ring-shaped and plate geometrical shapes. We used the package CFDOF for the design system FreeCAD for the analysis. The results of the simulation show that the difference in the pressure drop for two geometrical shapes does not exceed 3.2%, which indicates that the conditional unwinding of the membrane module in the plane is an accurate enough approximation for the considered hypothetical conditions.