Effect of sintering temperature on natural ceramic membrane for aquaculture effluent treatment

Abstract

Nowadays, amount of aquaculture wastewater produced in Malaysia is increasing due to the development of aquaculture. The ineffectiveness of conventional wastewater treatment will cause the present of some contaminants such as suspended solids, organic nitrogen and phosphorus in aquaculture effluent. Membrane technology is used to solve this problem. However, the membrane characteristics will affect the effectiveness of the membrane in removing the contaminants. Therefore, this study was proposed to determine the effect of sintering temperature on the characteristics and performance of ceramic membrane. The materials used to fabricate the ceramic membranes in this study were natural clay, sawdust, sodium silicate and polyethylene glycols (PEG). The ceramic membrane was fabricated by using slip casting and sintering process. The four different sintering temperatures (800, 900, 1000 and 1100°C) were used to fabricate ceramic membrane. The increased in sintering temperature has reduced the porosity (47.13% - 40.66%) but increased the density (0.89 -1.06) and mechanical strength (19.99MPa – 23.37MPa) of ceramic membrane respectively. The SEM results shown that the ceramic membranes formed were defect free. The pure water permeation of the ceramic membranes is directly proportional to filtration pressure applied which ranged from 0.5 bar to 3 bar. All the ceramic membranes were applied for aquaculture effluent treatment. The optimum sintering temperature was 1000°C which the ceramic membrane produced at this sintering temperature showed the highest removal of total suspended solids (98.91%) and turbidity (94.24%).