Reverse osmosis and forward osmosis fouling: a comparison

Our previously reported exploration (Journal of Membrane Science 565 (2018) 241–253) on the differences between fouling in reverse osmosis (RO) and forward osmosis (FO), used alginate as a foulant with initial conditions that ensured that the starting fluxes were the same. That study found that for a cellulose triacetate (CTA) membrane the extent of fouling, based on the analysis of foulant resistance, was greater when the membrane was part of a FO system. Herein, using the same methodology, results for a thin film composite membrane with alginate as the foulant are presented and these confirm the same general conclusion namely that the extent of foulant accumulation in FO mode is more severe than in RO mode. Furthermore the specific fouling resistance with alginate fouling in FO is more than for RO. However examining the overall operation including cleaning as well as fouling, this study suggests that FO operation is potentially less sensitive to fouling phenomena than RO for similar feed materials. This is due to the driving force compensation coming from a changing level of ICP. Some preliminary work including that with silica particles is also reported.

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.