Recovery of Water from Sewage Effluents using Alumina Ceramic Microfiltration Membranes

Abstract

This work highlights the recovery of water from sewage effluents using alumina ceramic membranes with pore sizes of 0.2 and 0.45 µm respectively in dead‐end filtration mode. The work demonstrates the ability and advantages of alumina‐based microfiltration (MF) membranes in filtering microbes and other harmful pollutants normally present in sewage effluents in dead‐end filtration mode. The fouling behavior of the membranes in the filtration cycle is identified, which in turn helped to regenerate the fouled membranes for subsequent usage. Regeneration studies of fouled membranes also suggest that though chemical cleaning was effective in recovering membrane performance, the fouling had still been progressed slowly and the membranes showed the ability to perform at least five filtration cycles of highly‐contaminated sewage effluents. As expected, the filtration efficiency and flux characteristics at various transmembrane pressure (TMP) of the membranes varies with the pore size of the membrane and is explained in light of Darcy's and Poiseuille's laws of filtration. The results show that alumina ceramic membrane with disc geometry having a pore size of 0.2 µm is more effective in filtering the total suspended solids, turbidity and microbes of the sewage effluents as compare to that of 0.45 µm membrane to a level in which the permeate water appears to be benign for discharging into the surface thereby offering the possibility of recycling or reusing the recovered water from the sewage effluents for suitable purposes.