Abstract
Microfiltration and ultrafiltration for water/wastewater treatment have gained global attention due to their high separation efficiency, while membrane fouling still remains one of their bottlenecks. In such a situation, many researchers attempt to obtain a deep understanding of fouling mechanisms and to develop effective fouling controls. Therefore, this article intends to trigger discussions on the appropriate choice of foulant surrogates and the application of mathematic models to analyze fouling mechanisms in these filtration processes. It has been found that the commonly used foulant surrogate (sodium alginate) cannot ideally represent the organic foulants in practical feed water to explore the fouling mechanisms. More surrogate foulants or extracellular polymeric substance (EPS) extracted from practical source water may be more suitable for use in the studies of membrane fouling problems. On the other hand, the support vector machine (SVM) which focuses on the general trends of filtration data may work as a more powerful simulation tool than traditional empirical models to predict complex filtration behaviors. Careful selection of foulant surrogate substances and the application of accurate mathematical modeling for fouling mechanisms would provide deep insights into the fouling problems.
Highlights
Wastewater reclamation is one of the effective countermeasures to tackle the water resource crisis
Membrane fouling refers to the phenomenon that sludge flocs, colloidal particles, bacteria/microorganism, dissolved macromolecules of organic matter or inorganic salts deposit on the membrane surface or are adsorbed in the membrane pores due to physicochemical and mechanical interactions with the membrane, resulting in a reduction or blockage in the membrane pores and irreversible decrease in membrane flux [4]
We investigated seven common polysaccharides and tried to find their differences in fouling mechanisms [4]
Summary
Wastewater reclamation is one of the effective countermeasures to tackle the water resource crisis. Current research interests in membrane fouling mainly include the following aspects: (i) membrane fabrication and modification for efficient fouling control; (ii) optimization of the operating conditions to minimize fouling (including the pre-treatment methods); (iii) adjustment of the environmental conditions such as the pH, presence of cations, and feed composition; and (iv) the development of novel simulation models for the analysis of fouling mechanism and prediction of fouling. All these foregoing studies pursue the same objective, i.e., fouling control, while the fundamental understanding of the fouling mechanism and the microstructure of fouling layers are still unclear. This article attempts to illustrate the current challenging problems in understanding the fouling mechanism of ultrafiltration/microfiltration and try to provide more useful recommendations for fouling analysis and prevention
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