Taking into account the close similarity between pervaporation and vapour permeation techniques, a method for employing pervaporation flux data in the modelling of vapour permeation modules is proposed. It is based on the use of fugacity gradients across the membrane, instead of concentration ones, as the driving force for mass transfer. This procedure is interesting, for instance, in the case of aroma recovery systems, for which there is much more experimental data on pervaporation available in the literature than on vapour permeation. In order to illustrate the application of this method, pervaporation experiments for an isotropic PDMS membrane were conducted with aqueous solutions of ethyl acetate (113-2474 mg/L), and the results obtained were used to enable simulation of different vapour permeation hollow-fibre modules for recovering ethyl acetate from diluted air streams.
pervaporation; vapour permeation; aroma; VOC; fruit juices
