Research Projects

The project aims to develop a clean and environmentally friendly separation technique for recovering and reusing HCl from industrial waste water. This is a problem associated with about 2200 industries in the Punjab region alone. The project will focus on developing an innovative, economical, and environmentally friendly alternative technique for industries dealing with acid-rich effluents, capable of alleviating manufacturing costs compared to existing techniques. The methodology project will be divided into three phases: in-situ preliminary small-scale membrane development, prototype designing, and validating the prototype via adequate testing with real industrial samples. The research group has already developed a membrane to separate Sulfuric acid from acidic hydrolysate using membrane-based technology, which can be used for separation of HCl from industrial effluents. The acid recovery procedure involves collecting HCl effluent from a common effluent treatment plant CETP, applying a pre-filtration process to remove large solid particles, and treating the pre-filtered HCl effluent with a diffusion dialysis unit. The proposed membrane-based technology will be capable of separating about 70% of spent HCl, making it reusable and economically feasible. The project aims to address the problem common to various industries, such as electroplating industries, contributing to highly acidic waste water.