Study on operational conditions to minimize membrane fouling in MBR wastewater treatment process at ITOB industrial zone

This study aimed to minimize membrane fouling on MBR membranes at ITOB wastewater treatment plant and hardness removal from wastewater. With this aim, first coagulation method was applied as pretreatment. Al2(SO4)3, FeCl3, Ca(OH)2, Na2CO3, NaHCO3 and cationic polymer as coagulant enhancer are used as coagulants. The effect of coagulant concentration, pH, the use cationic polymer as coagulant enhancer was investigated in details. From the results obtained, it was seen that Ca(OH)2 gave the best rejection with respect to hardness removal (87%) from wastewater. In the second step of thesis, the construction of a pilot MBR system was established. The membranes used in this study were Kubota flat sheet MBR membranes with a pore size of 0.04 micron made from polyethylene. In the field tests using both tap water and wastewater, the fouling on MBR membrane was investigated by monitoring flux decline vs time. In order to clean membranes, different chemical cleaning strategies were applied. In addition during MBR treatment study, using antiscalant to prevent membrane fouling was investigated in order to understand it is helpful or not