Fouling in gravity driven Point-of-Use drinking water treatment systems

Abstract

h i g h l i g h t sFouling in membrane based Point-of-Use drinking water systems was studied. Flux stabilization was observed for hollow fiber membrane configuration. Two different fouling mechanisms evolved in inside/out vs outside/in configuration. Intermittently operated inside/out membrane resulted in lowest hydraulic resistance. a r t i c l e i n f o Intermittent operation resulted in lower overall hydraulic resistances compared to continuously operated systems. This was due to the low organic loading and relaxation of the fouling layer during periods of standstill. In most experiments the fouling layer mainly consisted of diatoms, inorganic particles and few microbial clusters. The PoU systems investigated can be operated for longer duration without the need for strong chemical cleaning.

Drinking Water Treatment and Challenges in Developing Countries

“…One of the problems with the prolonged use of filters is the potential build-up of biofouling on the surface of the filter [66].…”

Evaluation of hydrodynamic behavior of biosand filters using computational fluid dynamics combined with the design of experiments

“…Point-of-use (POU) water treatment technologies combine physical and biological treatments (Chawla et al 2017) in a smart and cheap solution to rural and urban areas where access to drinking water is limited or nonexistent (Kennedy et al 2012); that is, it is an accessible and easy to implement technology. One of the most promising POU technologies is the biosand filter (BSF), distributed worldwide by nonprofit organizations (Chan et al 2018).…”

Novel housing designs for nanofiltration and ultrafiltration gravity-driven recycled membrane-based systems

“…challenge (i)). Due to the low flux, GDM systems require a relatively higher specific membrane filtration area per unit module volume compared with conventional systems [8,10], which impacts the total cost (estimated membrane cost at around 25 USD m -2 [11]) (i.e. challenge (ii)).…”

“…Squirt [21], SkySpod [22], LifeStraw community [23] and ZeroTWO™ [24]). For all of these systems membrane fouling remains a core issue, although several fouling reduction techniques have been proposed, including membrane surface relaxation [11,17,25,26] and periodic application of shear stress (e.g. flushing [11,17,25] and backwashing [27]).…”