Ammonia stripping from undigested swine manure slurry using microporous hollow fibers - apriori modelling of ammonia flux

The recovery of nutrients and minerals for application outside the agricultural sector or for improving crop nutrients management efficiency has become a necessity in regions of concentrated confined animal production. Problems associated with surplus nutrients, could be partly solved by the use of membrane technology to perform a separation of the liquid swine manure into small concentrated fractions with high fertilizer value that could be exported to other agricultural regions. Many conventional ways to remove ammonia by lime treatment and aeration or stripping are generally costly and inefficient. Membrane contactors offer attractive advantages compared to the traditional techniques. One major advantage being the larger interfacial area per unit volume facilitating fast separation of ammonia from pig slurry with a lower energy input per mole ammonia removed. One of the major challenges though is to develop proper scale-up procedures from laboratory to full scale equipment. The aim of this work was to alleviate some of those problems.