High-Resolution Numerical Simulation of Microfiltration of Oil-in-Water Emulsion Permeating through a Realistic Membrane Microporous Structure Generated by Focused Ion Beam Scanning Electron Microscopy Images.

Owing to the limitations of visualization techniques in experimental studies and low-resolution numerical models based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD), the detailed behavior of oil droplets during microfiltration is not well understood. Hence, a high-resolution CFD model based on an in-house direct numerical simulation (DNS) code was constructed in this study to analyze the detailed dynamics of an oil-in-water (O/W) emulsion using a microfiltration membrane. The realistic microporous structure of commercial ceramic microfiltration membranes (mullite and α-alumina membranes) was obtained using an image processing technique based on focused ion beam scanning electron microscopy (FIB-SEM).