Impacts of the specific cake resistance on mbr fouling for wastewater treatment

Membrane bioreactor (MBR) has been increasingly used for municipal wastewater treatment and reuse due to its good effluent quality. However, membrane fouling remains the major limitation of MBR. Understanding fouling is still a key issue for a more sustainable operation of MBRs. Thus, this research presents the influence of specific cake resistance (α) on the fouling propensity in the MBR. Correlation between α value with fouling resistance (Rf), fouling rate (dTMP/dt), especially of peak height 100-1000 kDa protein-like SMPs was investigated. The result reported that the α value was strongly correlated with the dTMP/dt in the MBR (R2 value of close to 1). In this study, however, there is an obvious discrepancy between the fouling resistance calculated from the resistance in the series model and the α value in the supernatant filtration. These observations demonstrated that the fouling propensities of the membrane could be monitored by the transmembrane pressure and the fouling characteristics, include fouling resistance and specific cake resistance in the filtration cell.