Membrane Fouling Control in Submerged Membrane Bioreactor Using Inclined Plate Settler

Abstract

Membrane separation technology has been widely applied in water and wastewater treatment, especially in the water reclamation and recycling. However, the membrane fouling decreases the membrane efficiency and increases the cost of the process; thus limited the membrane application. There are two types of Membrane Bio-Reactor (MBR), immersed (iMBR) and side streamed (sMBR). However, the membranes surfaces of these two types MBR are always directly exposed to high concentration of suspended solid and easily to get fouling. A novel MBR was designed to reduce membrane fouling. The inclined plate setup in iMBR can separate high SS from direct contact with the membrane surface and decrease membrane fouling rate as expected. The novel iMBR used in this study consists of aeration zone, settling zone, and filtration zone. The synthetic wastewater was used in this study also. The reactor operated under the upflow mode of operation with 0.06µm membrane pore size. The results show that the novel iMBR can reduce the SS concentration in the filtration zone up to 98.6% and increase the permeate flux over 51.13% than that of normal conventional iMBR. For the effluent quality the COD and TOC were also measured. In the experiments and the results show that removal efficiency of COD and TOC in novel iMBR reached 96.9% and 96.8% respectively.