This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues.Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited. b s t r a c tResults reported here highlight the potential and several challenges in the development of a novel osmotic membrane bioreactor (OMBR) process for the treatment of municipal wastewater. Following the initial gradual decline, a stable permeate flux value was obtained after approximately four days of continuous operation. There was evidence of continuous deterioration of biological activity of the OMBR system, possibly due to the build-up of salinity in the reactor. The removal of 25 out of 27 trace organic compounds with molecular weight higher than 266 g/mol was above 80% and was possibly governed by the interplay between physical separation of the FO membrane and biodegradation. In contrast, the removal efficiency values of the other 23 trace organic compounds with molecular weight less than 266 g/mol were very scattered. The removal efficiency of these low molecular weight compounds by OMBR treatment appears to depend mostly on biological degradation. Crown

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The rejection of trace organic contaminants (TrOCs) by an osmotically driven membrane filtration process was investigated. A set of 40 compounds representing major groups of TrOCs of concern was selected for this study. The rejection of the TrOCs by a commercial cellulose acetate asymmetric forward osmosis membrane, as well as a ''tight'' commercial thin-film composite nanofiltration (NF) membrane, was systematically investigated and compared under three different operating modes: forward osmosis (FO), pressure retarded osmosis (PRO) and reverse osmosis (RO). Results revealed that the cellulose acetate membrane had considerably smaller water and salt permeabilities as well as less negative surface charge compared to the NF membrane. However, the cellulose acetate membrane resulted in considerably higher water flux than the NF when operated in FO and PRO modes. Nevertheless, the NF membrane displayed consistently better TrOC rejection than the HTI membrane. In RO mode, electrostatic interactions played a dominant role in governing the rejection of charged TrOCs. In FO and PRO modes, the rejection of charged TrOCs was governed by both electrostatic interaction and size exclusion, while rejection of neutral compounds was dominated by size exclusion, with rejection increasing with TrOC molecular weight. Operating in PRO mode resulted in a higher water flux but a notably lower TrOC rejection as compared with FO mode, because of more severe internal concentration polarization (ICP) phenomenon. Another important observation from this study is that rejection of neutral TrOCs in FO mode was higher than that in RO mode. This could be attributed to the retarded forward diffusion of TrOCs resulting from reverse salt flux of the NaCl draw solution, a phenomenon that takes place in FO mode but is not possible in RO mode.

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