An AwwaRF Project, Optimization of Membrane Treatment for Direct and Clarified Water
Filtration, has been studying the effect of pretreatment chemicals on membrane filtration
performance. The primary objective of this research is to develop a unified understanding of the
interaction between water quality, pretreatment chemicals, and membrane materials, and to
evaluate the difference between membrane performance when studied at the bench and pilot
scale. One component of the research has been to evaluate the fouling of
membranes by various constituents in the water sources. The focus of this research was
to describe experiments in which water was fractionated by microfiltration and ultrafiltration
through membranes with various pore sizes, after which the fouling potential of the prefiltered
water was determined.
Previous projects have tried to explain fouling mechanisms of ultrafiltration (UF) and
microfiltration (MF) membranes with artificially prepared water and separating out fulvic acids,
humic acids, and humic substances from natural source waters. These experiments have tried to
establish a relationship between artificial water fouling and natural water fouling. Fractionation
analysis with artificial water and natural source water with 100,000 Daltons (Da) and 0.16 µm
did not show consistency between various sources of natural organic matter (NOM) (Yuan and Zydney, 1999, 2000). NOM is an important factor in membrane filtration and is considered one of
the most significant foulants in natural water. NOM affects disinfection byproduct formation,
color, taste and odor, hardness, iron, manganese, arsenic, and other organic and inorganic
compounds. UF and MF membranes initially were used in situations with high quality water
with low fouling tendency, but the membrane technology is now being used more extensively for
challenging waters that can foul the membrane extensively and shorten membrane life.
Challenging waters need pretreatment for enhancing the flux, so various coagulants were
evaluated for flux improvement. This project is an effort to quantify foulants based on size
distribution and to evaluate the effect of pretreatment on the size distribution of foulants. Includes 5 references, tables, figures.
| Edition : | Vol. - No. |
| File Size : | 1
file
, 510 KB |
| Note : | This product is unavailable in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus |
| Number of Pages : | 11 |
| Published : | 03/01/2005 |
