Treatment of olive mill washing water by ultrafiltration

Olive oil production requires important quantities of washing water containing low oil concentrations, but classical processes used to recover or to eliminate this oil are ineffective. This study presents a membrane technique to treat olive oil mill washing water using different commercial ultrafiltration membranes: one organic (PCI) and two ceramic (Ceraver) membranes. The influence of the hydrodynamic parameters (transmembrane pressure and flow rate) and the cut‐off membranes on the efficiency of the ultrafiltration process was evaluated, and it was shown the organic PCI membrane could reduce pollution due to organic matter by decreasing the value of the Chemical oxygen demand by about 90%. Moreover, the nature of the ultrafine pore membrane appeared to be an important parameter which may strongly increase or decrease the capacity of the membrane. The membrane cut‐off did not have a strong influence on the performance of the process but if the membrane pores were too large the stability of the dynamically formed membrane decreased at transmembrane pressures greater than 0.2 MPa.