Progresses and new perspectives of integrated operations for a sustainable industrial growth

1. Introduction : Research progresses in Chemistry and Chemical Engineering have been made during the last decades with important contributions to the industrial development and to the quality of our life. An interesting case is related to the membrane science and technology continuous impact to innovative processes and products, particularly appropriate for a sustainable industrial growth. Membrane operations have been familiar for many years to biologists and chemists working in their laboratorier or studying biological phenomena. Only recently engineers started to operate in' this area. The preparation of asymmetric CA membranes at University of California, Los Angeles in the early 60s is generally recognized as a crucial moment for membranology (1). Loeb and Sourirajan with their discovery of how to increase significantly the permeability of polymeric membranes without significant changes in their selectivity, made realistic the possibility of their use in large scale operations for desalting brackish and sea water by reverse osmosis and for various other molecular separations in different industrial areas. Reverse osmosis is today a well recognized basic unit operations, togheter with ultrafiltration, crossflow microfiltration,. nanofiltration, all pressure driven membrane processes. Already in 1992 more than 4 milIions m$^3$/day were the total capacity of RO desalination plants and in 1995 more than 180.000 m$^2$ of ultrafiltration membranes were installed for the treatment of wheys and milk (2) (3).