PhD DEFENSE BY CANDICE REY

This PhD was co-supervised by Frédéric Pignon (LRP) and Alain Dufresne (LGP2).

The defense will take place at 11 am in the Rassat amphitheatre.

Abstract

Membrane separation processes commonly used in several industrial applications, like bio and agro industries, waste water and clean water treatments, are more and more exploited in biorefinery. As an example, cross-flow ultrafiltration process shows a high potential in separation protocol of raw feed components like cellulose nanocrystals to produce biomass. This process is limited by the increase of particles concentration at the membrane surface, which conducts to phenomena named concentration polarization and fouling, which decrease the filtration performance. The PhD work objective is to bring a better understanding of the mechanisms involved in the formation of these phenomena. Two characterization methods covering length scales from nanometer to micrometer have been developed thanks to new designed tangential ultrafiltration cells allowing to link the ultrafiltration process to small angle X rays scattering and to micro particle image velocimetry. These measurement performed in-situ during ultrafiltration of nanocrystal celluloses and Laponite clay suspensions have allowed characterizing the structural organization and the velocity field within the concentration polarization layers. The correlation of these results with the rheological behavior properties of the suspensions, have permitted to access for the first time to the stress field within the concentration polarization and fouling layer during the tangential ultrafiltration process.