Potentials of anaerobic membrane bioreactors to overcome treatment limitations induced by industrial wastewaters

Celebrating 40 years anaerobic sludge bed reactors for industrial wastewater treatment

“…Their popularity for treating industrial wastewaters can be attributed to their compactness, ease of operation, while applying high VLRs at low HRTs (Rajeshwari et al 2000;van Lier 2008). More recently, membrane coupled high-rate anaerobic reactor configurations are increasingly being researched, due to the large amount of comparable knowledge from aerobic MBR operations and the application niche which clearly exists for these systems (Dereli et al 2012). Membrane assisted sludge retention ensures the accumulation of very slowly growing micro-organisms with inferior adherence properties, that are frequently needed for the anaerobic treatment of toxic and recalcitrant wastewaters.…”

“…AnMBRs combine the advantages of both MBR and anaerobic technology (Dereli et al 2012;Ersahin et al 2014). Operational costs related to energy requirements for gas/liquid recirculation for membrane fouling control and chemical costs required for membrane cleaning are still heavy burdens on the economic feasibility of AnMBRs.…”

“…Therefore, AnMBR technology may present an attractive option for treating industrial wastewaters at extreme conditions, such as high salinity (Yang et al 2013), high temperature (Jeison et al 2009), high SS concentrations and presence of toxicity (Muñoz Sierra et al 2014), that hamper granulation and biomass retention or reduce the biological activity (Dereli et al 2012). Industrial wastewaters with extreme physicochemical characteristics will likely occur more often in the future as cleaner industrial production processes require reduction of water consumption, water reuse and resource recovery (van Lier 2008;Dereli et al 2012). Futselaar et al (2013) claim that it is possible to obtain higher COD to methane conversion efficiencies in AnMBRs in comparison to conventional UASB reactors for the treatment of industrial wastewaters.…”

Performance evaluation of an side-stream anaerobic membrane bioreactor: Synthetic and alcoholic beverage industry wastewater

“…Although there are several studies about AnMBR in the literature, as reported by Dereli et al, there is still a large knowledge gap for the design and operation of full-scale AnMBRs [7]. The purpose of the present study is to evaluate the performance of an anaerobic side-stream membrane bioreactor under different operational conditions for high strength wastewater (i.e.…”

Instrumentation, control, and automation for submerged anaerobic membrane bioreactors

“…On the other hand, submerged AnMBR technology has been successfully applied for the treatment of industrial wastewater at full scale in the last years [9]. However, submerged MBR technology has not yet been applied to full-scale anaerobic urban wastewater treatment.…”