An integrated model for physical-biological wastewater organic removal in a submerged membrane bioreactor: Model development and parameter estimation

The fouling phenomenon in membrane bioreactors: Assessment of different strategies for energy saving

“…In particular, by reducing qa an increase of the thickness of the cake layer takes place as an effect of the higher amount of solids deposited on the membrane surface. The higher cake layer thickness causes a reduction in the COD concentration at the membrane effluent due to the cake layer basically acting as an extra filter [33]. Such a circumstance leads to an increase of COD inside the MBR tank and consequently the mixed liquor recycled from the MBR to the aerobic tank contains a higher COD mass, thus influencing the biological processes occurring inside the aerobic and the MBR tank.…”

“…However, the R irr at low qa has a lower influence on money demand with respect to qa. Thus lower air flow has a beneficial effect in terms of effluent quality due to the formation of a thicker cake layer that acts as an additional filter (among others, [33]). For scenario 2 the best condition in terms of energy demand, money demand and EQI corresponds to the minimum value of qa (namely, 2 L m −2 s −1 ).…”

“…In particular, the model assumes that a fraction of particles can be retained inside the cake layer. In this way, a possible reduction of the COD due to the presence of the cake layer (biological filter) is taken into account (see, [17,33]). The total filtration resistance (R t ) is calculated as the sum of the total resistances of each ith areal section (R tS(i) ).…”

Sludge filterability and dewaterability in a membrane bioreactor for municipal wastewater treatment

“…So far, most of researches have been focused on understanding the mechanisms governing membrane fouling, with a special attention to the impact of membrane scouring aeration [2,3,4], the effect of soluble microbial products and extracellular polymeric substances [5,6,7] and the applicability of the critical flux concept for a more sustainable operation of the process [8,9,10]. More recently a growing interest in the application of conventional activated sludge models ASM 1, ASM2d and ASM3 has spread throughout scientific community [11,12,13] aimed at predicting the performances of the process under various operational conditions which are in some cases extremely different than the typical ones of conventional activated sludge. In this field many efforts are focused on coupling biological process and fouling development in integrated model.…”

Uncertainty assessment of a membrane bioreactor model using the GLUE methodology

“…However, the GLUE methodology has, as far as the authors know, never been applied in MBR modelling. The authors have already conducted a study on the sensitivity of a MBR model to variations of its parameters and the availability of calibration data [25], which was regarded as a part of the model development. This paper is the continuation of that work, and focuses solely on the quantification of uncertainties.…”