Membrane bioreactors for wastewater treatment: A review of mechanical cleaning by scouring agents to control membrane fouling

Effect of magnetic powder on membrane fouling mitigation and microbial community/composition in membrane bioreactors (MBRs) for municipal wastewater treatment

“…Several methods have been used to alleviate membrane fouling in MBRs by modifying membrane materials, optimizing operational conditions and improving sludge properties of mixed liquors (Aslam et al, 2017;Ye et al, 2017;Zhou et al, 2014). Since the first two methods always increase membrane price or maintenance costs, adding coagulants, absorbents or carriers to MBRs to improve sludge properties of mixed liquors has been done extensively to mitigate membrane fouling (Chen et al, 2017;Miao et al, 2017).…”

The Performance and Fouling Control of Submerged Hollow Fiber (HF) Systems: A Review

“…In practice, the solid particles are brought into close contact with the membrane surface via fluidization, which is the process whereby the particles are dispersed and suspended by the liquid such that they behave like a fluid [234,235]; thereby, the fouling layer on the membrane surface is mechanically scoured by the particles. A recent review assessed the mechanical cleaning concepts in membrane filtration [27]. Wang et al [204] concluded that particle fluidization is similar to cleaning via bubbling in terms of (i) the momentum of both bubbles and fluidized granular activated carbon (GAC) correlates more strongly with the critical flux, rather than to the velocities or concentrations; and (ii) an increase in energy input increases the critical flux.…”

“…The first report was on the use of a two-stage AFBR-AFMBR (i.e., anaerobic fluidized-bed bioreactor-anaerobic fluidized-bed membrane bioreactor) for sustainable control of membrane fouling [24]. Extensive tests subsequently have been carried out [24,27,128,130,244,, especially in view of the potentially lower energy cost than that of bubbling [24,204] and suitability for the anaerobic MBR. Effects of treating different types of wastewater [258,259,261,262,276] (e.g., using municipal versus synthetic wastewater [24,258]), trace organics [128,278], membrane type [273] (including effects on membrane integrity [271,272,275]), screen size [259], fluidized media [236,244,279,280] (including size and packing amount [244,267,268,271,275]), operating conditions [260,271] such as temperature [260][261][262], scale [261], design [130,261,264,265,276] (e.g., single (AFMBR) versus two-stage (AFBR-AFMBR) systems …”

Computational fluid dynamics simulation as a tool for optimizing the hydrodynamic performance of membrane bioreactors

“…Membrane bioreactor (MBR) technology has been used for the membrane ltration of activated sludge for wastewater treatment to produce high effluent quality with a small environmental footprint. [1][2][3] However, problems associated with membrane fouling constitute a major drawback for the use of MBRs in waste water treatment plants. Aerated membrane tanks can be used for fouling control, however use of these membrane systems involves high energy consumption.…”