The spiral-wound element is an industry standard because of its high membrane area packing density, low cost of manufacture, and extensive installation base worldwide. Plastic mesh spacers create a feed-channel between facing membrane leafs and promote turbulent flow, which aids to reduce solute concentration polarization and related scaling and fouling phenomena. Computational and experimental...

Two parallel anaerobic membrane bioreactors (MBRs), integrated with or without ultrasound equipment for online membrane fouling control (US-AnMBR, or AnMBR) were established to digest waste activated sludge (WAS). The characteristics of bound extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) and bacterial communities in the systems were investigated for further understanding of the membrane fouling mech...

One of the major obstacles preventing a more widespread application of membrane technology is the fact that the filtration performance inevitably decreases with filtration time. The understanding of causes of flux decline and the ability of predicting the flux performance is crucial for more extensive membrane applications. Therefore, this review focused on the analysis of the interrelated dyna...

Industrial wastewater treatment from cattle slaughterhouses traditionally use dissolved air floatation (DAF) to remove the high organic content of fat, oil and grease (FOG) from wastewaters and recover them for producing other products, including tallow, gelatine and food additives. Dissolved air floatation presents several operating difficulties including the large size, high energy use and od...

Carboxyls are inherent functional groups of thin-film composite polyamide nanofiltration (NF) membranes, which may play a role in membrane performance and fouling. Their surface presence is attributed to incomplete reaction of acyl chloride monomers during the membrane active layer synthesis by interfacial polymerization. In order to unravel the effect of carboxyl group density on organic fouli...

It has been proven that a versatile bio-glue, polydopamine, can firmly bind TiO2 (titanium dioxide) nanoparticles on thin film composite (TFC) membranes. In this work, the anti-fouling behaviour of this novel polydopamine-TiO2-modified membrane is evaluated, based on the static bovine serum albumin (BSA) surface adhesion of the membranes and the relative flux decline. The results show that the ...

The application of anion exchange resins (AERs) has been limited by the critical problem of resin fouling, which increases the volume of the desorption concentrate and decreases treatment efficiency. To date, resin fouling has not been well studied and is poorly understood compared to membrane fouling. To reflect the resin fouling level, a resin fouling index (RFI) was established in this work ...

Fouling and scaling in membrane distillation (MD) is one of the significant barriers to its continued growth. Fouling in MD blocks the pores, causing a decline in permeate flux, and may eventually lead to wetting of a hydrophobic membrane by the saline feed, contaminating the permeate. Many previous studies on MD have observed that while MD is more fouling resistant than reverse osmosis (RO), i...

In the current research, ABS-co-PEG nanofiltration membrane was prepared by solution casting technique using N, N dimethyl acetamide as solvent. The effect of PEG concentration as additive in the casting solution on membrane flux, salt rejection, phase inversion time, water content, membrane porosity, membrane tensile strength and fouling was studied. Also the eff...

A mathematical model was developed for combined fouling due to biofilms and mineral precipitates in membrane feed channels with spacers. Finite element simulation of flow and solute transport in two-dimensional geometries was coupled with a particle-based approach for the development of a composite (cells and crystals) foulant layer. Three fouling scenarios were compared: biofouling only, scali...