Abstract
Membrane technology has advanced substantially as a preferred choice for the exclusion of widespread pollutants for reclaiming water from various treatment effluent. Currently, little information is available about Ultrafiltration (UF)/Nanofiltration (NF)/Reverse Osmosis (RO) performance at a pilot scale as a practical engineering application. In this study, the effluent from a full-scale membrane bioreactor (MBR) municipal wastewater treatment works (MWWTWs) was treated with an RO pilot plant. The aim was to evaluate the effect of operating conditions in the removal of selected inorganics as a potential indirect water reuse application. The influent pH, flux, and membrane recovery were the operating conditions varied to measure its influence on the rejection rate. MBR/RO exhibited excellent removal rates (>90%) for all selected inorganics and met the standard requirements for reuse in cooling and irrigation system applications. The UF and NF reduction of inorganics was shown to be limited to meet water standards for some of the reuse applications due to the high Electron Conductivity (EC > 250 μS·cm−1) levels. The MBR/NF was irrigation and cooling system compliant, while for the MBR/UF, only the cooling system was compliant.
Highlights
Water reclamation is substantial to contribute to the increasing demand for water due to climate change, population growth, and over-consumption [1]
The pilot plant consisted of three different thin film composite (TFC) polyamide (PA) membrane modules, in parallel, which was subjected to various experimental running conditions (Table 1)
The performance of membranes was assessed by measuring the physicochemical parameters, salt rejection and total dissolved solids (TDS), with the pilot plant operation condition of flux, recovery at 30 L·m−2 h−1, 75% respectively, as well as control and uncontrolled pH
Summary
Water reclamation is substantial to contribute to the increasing demand for water due to climate change, population growth, and over-consumption [1]. In many cases, high-quality effluent provided for discharge by MBR systems is still not able to be used directly as irrigation and process water, because it does not meet the recommended final pollutant concentrations for reuse [5]. Acero et al (2010) [2] reported that treated municipal wastewater effluent is considered a source to produce reclaimed water [11,12] and can help inhibit the harmful effects of algal blooms and eutrophication in urban water systems [13]. Numerous authors concur that the MBR process, combined with tertiary treatment, is found to be suitable for the purification of municipal wastewater to produce high-quality water for reuse [10,11,12]. Some studies concluded that a combined MBR–NF/RO system could be considered as a possible alternative for treated wastewater recycling for irrigation purposes [6,14]
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