The objective of this work is the treatment and purification of an aqueous solution loaded with a mixture of dyes, malachite green (MG) and rhodamine B (Rh-B) using a green emulsified membrane GELM. The proposed GELM process consists of a surfactant (Span 80), an internal phase (sulfuric acid) and a diluent (soybean oil). A Box-Behnken design was implemented to optimize the operating parameters. Three factors were varied: the mass percentage of Span 80, the concentration of the internal phase and a volume ratio Vext/Vem, while keeping the other parameters constant.
The results of the optimization give an extraction yield of the dye mixture of 99.77% under the following optimum conditions:
10% by mass for Span 80, a concentration of 0.5 M for the internal phase and a Vext/Vem volume ratio of 7.