Membrane biofilm development was evaluated to improve psychrophilic (15°C) anaerobic membrane bioreactor (AnMBR) treatment of domestic wastewater. An AnMBR containing three replicate submerged membrane housings with separate permeate collection was operated at three levels of membrane fouling by independently controlling biogas sparging for each membrane unit. High membrane fouling significantl...

Membrane Condenser (MC) is a novel membrane contactor operation recently investigated for the valorization of industrial waste gaseous streams. In particular, until now, it was applied for water recovery from flue gas, cooling tower plumes, etc. More recently, its effectiveness and flexibility in contaminants (such as, NH3 , HF, SO2 ) removal and control from waste gaseous streams was also prov...

The effect of backwash frequency (15, 30 and 60 min) and influent flux (3.75, 7.50 and 11.25 L/h/m) on fouling amelioration in an innovative external side-stream dead-end microfiltration anaerobic membrane bioreactor (AnMBR) for the treatment of domestic wastewater at 25EC was investigated. During 6 months of reactor operation, a constant COD removal of 88% and an accumulation of 350 mg TSS/L/d...

Pleated membrane filters are widely used in many applications, and offer significantly better surface area to volume ratios than equal-area unpleated membrane filters. However, their filtration characteristics are markedly inferior to those of equivalent unpleated membrane filters in dead-end filtration. While several hypotheses have been advanced for this, one possibility is that the flow fiel...

Bio-fouling is a serious problem in many membrane-based separation processes for water and wastewater treatment. Current state of the art methods to overcome this are to modify the membranes with either hydrophilic additives or with an antibacterial compound. In this study, we propose and practise a novel concept to prevent bio-fouling by developing a killing and self-cleaning membrane surface ...

The aim of this work is to design and integrate an optimized batch membrane process in a conventional purification process used for the treatment of tannery wastewater. The integration was performed by using two spiral wound membrane modules in series, that is, nanofiltration and reverse osmosis, as substitutes to the biological reactor. The membrane process was designed in terms of sensible fo...

This study focused on the effect of powder activated carbon (PAC) adsorption on microfiltration (MF) membrane performance. The results showed that PAC pretreatment offered high organic matter removal rates for both dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and ultraviolet absorbance at 254 nm (UV254) during 10-200 mg/L PAC dosage. The removal efficiencies of organic matter by MF membrane filtration decrea...

Algae organic matter (AOM), including intracellular organic matter (IOM) and extracellular organic matter (EOM), are major membrane foulants in the treatment of algae-polluted water. In this study, the effects of EOM and IOM (at dissolved organic concentrations of 8 mg/L) on the fouling of a poly(ether sulfone) ultrafiltration (UF) membrane were investigated using a dead-end down-flow UF unit. ...