Abstract
In this paper a chemical cleaning sequence model is proposed that can be used to predict the fouling status of a membrane during multiple chemical cleaning cycles. The proposed model is used to minimize the overall operating costs – based on chemicals consumption, energy consumption and investment costs – over a fixed time horizon, guaranteeing production of a specified volume of permeate, where the number of cycles, the net production flux, the duration of a production phase and the duration of a subsequent cleaning phase are calculated. It was found that at the chemical cleaning cycle level, optimization of the cleaning variables does not strongly influence operational costs, however, optimization of the chemical cleaning cycle may be useful as a means of effective fouling control.