scholarly journals The Limitations in Current Studies of Organic Fouling and Future Prospects

Membranes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 922
Author(s):  
Xianghao Meng ◽  
Shujuan Meng ◽  
Yu Liu

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.

Membranes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 990
Author(s):  
Xianghao Meng ◽  
Fukuan Wang ◽  
Shujuan Meng ◽  
Rui Wang ◽  
Zhongyuan Mao ◽  
...  

It is difficult to recognize specific fouling mechanisms due to the complexity of practical feed water, thus the current studies usually employ foulant surrogates to carry out research, such as alginate and xanthan gum. However, the representativeness of these surrogates is questionable. In this work, the classical surrogates (i.e., alginate and xanthan gum) were systematically studied, and results showed that they behaved differently during filtration. For the mixture of alginate and xanthan gum, both filtration behaviors and adsorption tests performed by quartz-crystal microbalance with dissipation monitoring (QCM-D) indicated that alginate plays a leading role in fouling development. Furthermore, by examining the filtration behaviors of extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) extracted from practical source water, it turns out that the gel layer formation is responsible for EPS fouling, and the properties of gel layer formed by EPS share more similarities with that formed from pectin instead of alginate. In addition, with the use of experimental data sets extracted from this study and our previous studies, a modeling method was established and tested by the support vector machine (SVM) to predict complex filtration behaviors. Results showed that the small differences of fouling mechanisms lying between alginate and pectin cannot be recognized by Hermia’s models, and SVM can show a discrimination as high as 76.92%. As such, SVM may be a powerful tool to predict complex filtration behaviors.


2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaoying Zhu ◽  
Renbi Bai

Background: Bioactive compounds from various natural sources have been attracting more and more attention, owing to their broad diversity of functionalities and availabilities. However, many of the bioactive compounds often exist at an extremely low concentration in a mixture so that massive harvesting is needed to obtain sufficient amounts for their practical usage. Thus, effective fractionation or separation technologies are essential for the screening and production of the bioactive compound products. The applicatons of conventional processes such as extraction, distillation and lyophilisation, etc. may be tedious, have high energy consumption or cause denature or degradation of the bioactive compounds. Membrane separation processes operate at ambient temperature, without the need for heating and therefore with less energy consumption. The “cold” separation technology also prevents the possible degradation of the bioactive compounds. The separation process is mainly physical and both fractions (permeate and retentate) of the membrane processes may be recovered. Thus, using membrane separation technology is a promising approach to concentrate and separate bioactive compounds. Methods: A comprehensive survey of membrane operations used for the separation of bioactive compounds is conducted. The available and established membrane separation processes are introduced and reviewed. Results: The most frequently used membrane processes are the pressure driven ones, including microfiltration (MF), ultrafiltration (UF) and nanofiltration (NF). They are applied either individually as a single sieve or in combination as an integrated membrane array to meet the different requirements in the separation of bioactive compounds. Other new membrane processes with multiple functions have also been developed and employed for the separation or fractionation of bioactive compounds. The hybrid electrodialysis (ED)-UF membrane process, for example has been used to provide a solution for the separation of biomolecules with similar molecular weights but different surface electrical properties. In contrast, the affinity membrane technology is shown to have the advantages of increasing the separation efficiency at low operational pressures through selectively adsorbing bioactive compounds during the filtration process. Conclusion: Individual membranes or membrane arrays are effectively used to separate bioactive compounds or achieve multiple fractionation of them with different molecule weights or sizes. Pressure driven membrane processes are highly efficient and widely used. Membrane fouling, especially irreversible organic and biological fouling, is the inevitable problem. Multifunctional membranes and affinity membranes provide the possibility of effectively separating bioactive compounds that are similar in sizes but different in other physical and chemical properties. Surface modification methods are of great potential to increase membrane separation efficiency as well as reduce the problem of membrane fouling. Developing membranes and optimizing the operational parameters specifically for the applications of separation of various bioactive compounds should be taken as an important part of ongoing or future membrane research in this field.


2017 ◽  
Vol 93 (4) ◽  
pp. 101-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Inga Bethmann ◽  
Martin Jacob ◽  
Maximilian A. Müller

ABSTRACT Tax regimes treat losses and profits asymmetrically when profits are immediately taxed, but losses are not immediately refunded. We find that treating losses less asymmetrically by granting refunds less restrictively increases loss firms' investment: A third of the refund is invested and the rest is held as cash or returned to shareholders. However, the investment response is driven primarily by firms prone to engage in risky overinvestment. Consistent with the risk of misallocation, we find a delayed exit of low-productivity loss firms receiving less restrictive refunds, indicating potential distortion of the competitive selection of firms. This distortion also negatively affects aggregate output and productivity. Our results suggest that stimulating loss firms' investment with refunds unconditional on their future prospects comes at the risk of misallocation. JEL Classifications: G31; H21; H25.


Membranes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 380
Author(s):  
Yan Chen ◽  
Huiping Li ◽  
Weihai Pang ◽  
Baiqin Zhou ◽  
Tian Li ◽  
...  

Nanofiltration (NF) is a promising post-treatment technology for providing high-quality drinking water. However, membrane fouling remains a challenge to long-term NF in providing high-quality drinking water. Herein, we found that coupling pre-treatments (sand filtration (SF) and ozone–biological activated carbon (O3-BAC)) and NF is a potent tactic against membrane fouling while achieving high-quality drinking water. The pilot results showed that using SF+O3-BAC pre-treated water as the feed water resulted in a lower but a slowly rising transmembrane pressure (TMP) in NF post-treatment, whereas an opposite observation was found when using SF pre-treated water as the feed water. High-performance size-exclusion chromatography (HPSEC) and three-dimensional excitation–emission matrix (3D-EEM) fluorescence spectroscopy determined that the O3-BAC process changed the characteristic of dissolved organic matter (DOM), probably by removing the DOM of lower apparent molecular weight (LMW) and decreasing the biodegradability of water. Moreover, amino acids and tyrosine-like substances which were significantly related to medium and small molecule organics were found as the key foulants to membrane fouling. In addition, the accumulation of powdered activated carbon in O3-BAC pre-treated water on the membrane surface could be the key reason protecting the NF membrane from fouling.


2013 ◽  
Vol 734-737 ◽  
pp. 3071-3074
Author(s):  
Guo Dong Zhang ◽  
Zhong Liu

Aiming at the phenomenon that the chaff and corner reflector released by surface ship can influence the selection of missile seeker, this paper proposed a multi-target selection method based on the prior information of false targets distribution and Support Vector Machine (SVM). By analyzing the false targets distribution law we obtain two classification principles, which are used to train the SVM studies the true and false target characteristics. The trained SVM is applied to the seeker in the target selection. This method has advantages of simple programming and high classification accuracy, and the simulation experiment in this paper confirms the correctness and effectiveness of this method.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 1285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reza Attarzadeh ◽  
Jalal Amini ◽  
Claudia Notarnicola ◽  
Felix Greifeneder

This paper presents an approach for retrieval of soil moisture content (SMC) by coupling single polarization C-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and optical data at the plot scale in vegetated areas. The study was carried out at five different sites with dominant vegetation cover located in Kenya. In the initial stage of the process, different features are extracted from single polarization mode (VV polarization) SAR and optical data. Subsequently, proper selection of the relevant features is conducted on the extracted features. An advanced state-of-the-art machine learning regression approach, the support vector regression (SVR) technique, is used to retrieve soil moisture. This paper takes a new look at soil moisture retrieval in vegetated areas considering the needs of practical applications. In this context, we tried to work at the object level instead of the pixel level. Accordingly, a group of pixels (an image object) represents the reality of the land cover at the plot scale. Three approaches, a pixel-based approach, an object-based approach, and a combination of pixel- and object-based approaches, were used to estimate soil moisture. The results show that the combined approach outperforms the other approaches in terms of estimation accuracy (4.94% and 0.89 compared to 6.41% and 0.62 in terms of root mean square error (RMSE) and R2), flexibility on retrieving the level of soil moisture, and better quality of visual representation of the SMC map.


IEEE Access ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 64895-64905
Author(s):  
Essam H. Houssein ◽  
Diaa Salama Abdelminaam ◽  
Hager N. Hassan ◽  
Mustafa M. Al-Sayed ◽  
Emad Nabil

Author(s):  
Zhengtao Li ◽  
Wee TiO ◽  
Darren Sun

Membrane fouling is the bottleneck restricting membrane bioreactor (MBR) to be widely used for water reclamation. How to select the best membrane with anti-fouling property for MBR is always a...


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document