Characteristics of foulants in air-sparged side-stream tubular membranes used in a municipal wastewater membrane bioreactor

Membrane bioreactors (MBRs) have become very attractive during the past decade owing to their advantages, although MBR operation has not been optimized yet. Recently, air-sparged side-stream MBRs (ASMBRs) have received much attention because they can overcome the drawbacks of submerged MBRs such as the difficulty of cleaning membrane modules. Widespread application of MBRs has been limited by problems associated with membrane fouling, and ASMBRs are not exceptions. Hydraulic conditions on the membrane surface used in an ASMBR are different from those in a submerged MBR, and this difference affects the characteristics of foulants. The aim of this study was to determine foulant characteristics in a pilot-scale ASMBR operated at an existing municipal wastewater treatment plant. Cylindrical membrane modules holding about 100 membrane tubes each were installed vertically in the ASMBR. Differences of foulants depending on tube positions in the horizontal cross section were investigated in the first experiment. There were no significant differences in the foulant characteristics regardless of the tube positions in the membrane module. This first experiment also showed that humic substances were dominant in the foulants extracted from the tubular membranes used in the ASMBR, whereas hydrophilic substances such as polysaccharides/proteins were reportedly dominant in foulants in the case of submerged MBRs. In the following experiment, a tiny hollow-fiber membrane module was submerged in the ASMBR’s reaction tank to filter the shared biomass suspension and enable direct comparison of foulant characteristics in different MBR configurations (i.e., air-sparged side-stream versus submerged). Humic substances were again found to be dominant in foulants extracted from the ASMBR’s tubular membranes, whereas hydrophilic organic matter was dominant in foulants extracted from the submerged hollow-fiber membranes. We hypothesize that different hydraulic conditions in the two configurations brought about the difference in foulants. The results obtained in this study suggest that effective measures to address membrane fouling will differ depending on the MBR configuration.