High Flash Solvent Recovery Using Dual Purpose Ceramic Membrane Technology

Throughout the United States and around the world, a variety of industries are moving from conventional to high flash solvents, including dibasic and other esters, glycol ethers, and terpenes (d-limonene isomers). For instance, approximately 80% of the cleaning solvents used in the screen printing industry, representing more than $50 million per year in solvent sales, are high flash solvents. Although solvent costs range from $15 to $30 per gallon, recycling is limited because of the generally small average waste volumes generated in these highly segmented industries. At present, conventional waste reclamation on this scale is incapable of delivering on spec recycled solvent. In response, Media and Process Technology, Inc. (M&P) has developed an innovative low-cost, high- performance ceramic membrane technology that can recover high-quality, high flash solvents from spent material in an environmentally friendly manner. Moreover, this technology has dual use capability and can be used to recover spent rinse waters in these industries. Process feasibility has been demonstrated in recent bench treatability tests. In this Phase I effort, M&P proposes to scale up the bench tests to the pilot level to conduct various optimization and long-term performance tests.