Providing new distilling and/or de-scaling methods and systems herein is a matter of allowing for thermal balance without the need to fill a hot wet emulsion separation system with more steam and heat rejection devices to waste steam. One embodiment begins with efficiently utilizing three types of waste: (1) hot produced water along with its inherited thermal energy; (2) blowdown steam from drum-type boilers (DBs); and (3) return condensate of dry steam from the DBs. It ends with: (1) removing calcium hardness, magnesium hardness and silica, thereby recovering them as useful minerals; and (2) producing distillate for viscous oil recovery by steam injection and de-scaled hot brine for improved oil recovery by hot water flooding and/or other related methods. The vehicle to attain this set of solutions is a recycle brine multi-effect distillation (RB-ME) train comprises a forward feed section and a backward feed section along with two flashing stages.

Hydrophobic hollow-fiber membrane made from a vinylidene fluoride polymer with a wall and a wall thickness, an outer surface on its outer side, an inner surface on its inner side and facing its lumen and adjacent to the inner surface a supporting layer having a structure that is substantially isotropic across the wall thickness, the supporting layer extending over at least 80% of the wall thickness and comprising pores having an average diameter of less than 1 m, and wherein the hollow-fiber membrane has pores on its outer surface and on its inner surface, characterized in that the vinylidene fluoride polymer has a weight-average molecular weight M.sub.W in the range from 550 000 to 700 000 daltons and a polydispersivity greater than 3.0; the pores in the outer and in the inner surface are formed like islands and have a maximum ratio of their longitudinal extension to the transverse extension of 10; the porosity lies in the range from 50 to 90 vol. %, the wall thickness in the range from 50 to 300 m, and the diameter of the lumen in the range from 100 to 500 m; and the hollow-fiber membrane has a maximum separating pore diameter d.sub.max in the range from 0.3 to 0.7 m, determined according to the bubble point method.

The present disclosure relates to improved semipermeable membranes based on acrylonitrile copolymers for use in dialyzers for the extracorporeal treatment of blood in conjunction with hemodialysis, hemofiltration or hemodiafiltration. The present disclosure further relates to methods of producing such membranes.

Hydrophobic poly(4-methyl-1-pentene) hollow fiber membrane for retention of anesthetic agents with an inner and an outer surface and between inner and outer surface an essentially isotropic support layer with a sponge-like, open-pored, microporous structure free of macrovoids and adjacent to this support layer on the outer surface a dense separation layer with a thickness between 1.0 and 3.5 m. The membrane has a porosity in the range of greater than 35% to less than 50% by volume and a permeance for CO.sub.2 of 20-60 mol/(h.Math.m.sup.2.Math.bar), a gas separation factor (CO.sub.2/N.sub.2) of at least 5 and a selectivity CO.sub.2/anesthetic agents of at least 150. The process for producing this membrane is based on a thermally induced phase separation process in which process a homogeneous solution of a poly(4-methyl-1-pentene) in a solvent system containing components A and B is formed, wherein component A is a strong solvent and component B a weak non-solvent for the polymer component. After formation of a hollow fiber the hollow fiber is cooled in a liquid cooling medium to form a hollow fiber membrane. The concentration of the polymer component in the solution may be in the range from 42.5 to 45.8 wt.-% and the hollow fiber leaving the die runs through a gap between die and cooling medium with a gap length in the range of 5-30 mm.

The present invention relates to a method for the production of a positively charged membrane. Furthermore the present invention relates to a positively charged membrane obtainable by the methods of present invention and the use of these positively charged membranes.

Providing a membrane-forming solution suitable for producing a separation membrane such as a hollow fiber membrane and a flat membrane. A membrane-forming solution including triacetylcellulose having an acetyl group substitution degree of 2.7 or higher, a good solvent for thermally induced phase separation and a poor solvent for thermally induced phase separation, wherein the good solvent is capable of heat-dissolving the triacetylcellulose (at a solid content concentration of 25 mass %), and the poor solvent is incapable of dissolving the triacetylcellulose up to the heat dissolution temperature of the good solvent, wherein both the good solvent and the poor solvent are included so as to enable phase separation of the heat-dissolved triacetylcellulose solution while the heat-dissolved triacetylcellulose solution is cooled to room temperature (from 20 to 30 C.), and wherein a mixing ratio in a total amount of the good solvent and the poor solvent is from 5 to 40 mass % of the good solvent and from 60 to 95 mass % of the poor solvent.

Systems and methods can be used to produce fibers with external corrugations, internal corrugations, or both. These fibers can be used, for example, in hollow fiber membrane modules.

Methods are herein provided for preparing a material for casting a flat-sheet, extruding a solid-fiber, and/or extruding a hollow-fiber utilizing a chlorinated aqueous amine solution as an effective solvent to form a crystalline polymorph structure of the material. This material in the form of, for example, an effective vapor permeable membrane can be used in membrane distillation to desalinate saline streams.

The very purpose of an improved oil recovery or an enhanced oil recovery method is to mobilize oil from an oil-bearing formation as stable wet oil emulsion to an oil gathering center. Yet, the very purpose of the latter is to de-stabilize such a stable emulsion using a multitude of redundant oil-water separation steps and bulky equipment. Methods are herein provided for preparing a material for casting a flat-sheet, extruding a solid-fiber, and/or extruding a hollow-fiber utilizing an aqueous amine solution as an effective solvent to form a crystalline polymorph structure of the material. This material in the form of, for example, an effective and selective oil-wet membrane can be used to simultaneously de-mix oil and water phases from a wet oil emulsion, whether the emulsion is stable or instable.

A low cost, high selectivity asymmetric polyimide/polyethersulfone (PES) blend hollow fiber membrane, a method of making the membrane and its use for a variety of liquid, gas, and vapor separations such as deep desulfurization of gasoline and diesel fuels, ethanol/water separations, pervaporation dehydration of aqueous/organic mixtures, CO.sub.2/CH.sub.4, CO.sub.2/N.sub.2, H.sub.2/CH.sub.4, He/CH.sub.4, O.sub.2/N.sub.2, H.sub.2S/CH.sub.4, olefin/paraffin, iso/normal paraffins separations, and other light gas mixture separations. The polyimide/PES blend hollow fiber membrane is fabricated from a blend of a polyimide polymer and PES and showed surprisingly unique gas separation property with higher selectivities than either the polyimide hollow fiber membrane without PES polymer or the PES hollow fiber membrane without PES polymer for gas separations such as for H.sub.2/CH.sub.4, He/CH.sub.4, H.sub.2S/CH.sub.4, CO.sub.2/CH.sub.4 separations.