Bioreactors in Treating Textile Wastewater

The Membrane bioreactor (MBR) technology has being developed in many countries in the world. Due to its ability to produce a high quality effluent, the MBR technology can be applied to improve the environment and it can also help reducing the water resources needed through water recycling. Apparently, this technology has not yet been widely applied to the textile wastewater treatment in Indonesia since there are a number of factors, such as economy and technical reasons. From the technical point of view, there is still a lack of information available on factors influenced the MBR performance in treating textile wastewater. Thus, this study was aimed to evaluate both the lab-scale and plant scale submerged hollow fibre MBR performance on textile wastewater treatment. The lab-scale MBR, which had an operating volume of 5 L and an aeration system at the bottom, was operated in the fed-batch mode and fed with 2 L/day of textile wastewater from a textile mill outside Bandung, West Java, Indonesia. It was operated in 25 days where permeate was extracted at a constant flux between 5-6 LMH (L/m2/h) and HRT (hydraulic retention time) of 2.5–3 days. The MBR lab-scale result was compared to the plant-scale performance which operated in a constant flux of 5.6 LMH and HRT of 4.2 days. The result shows that the operation at the laboratory an