A Behavioural Membrane Fouling Model for Integrated Simulation of Membrane Bioreactors for Wastewater Treatment

AbstractThis paper presents a simple membrane fouling model intended for use in conjunction with an activated sludge model to form an integrated model of a membrane bioreactor (MBR). It is based on an earlier development of Liang et al.[1] who divided fouling into short-term reversible fouling tantamount with cake deposition and long-term irreversible fouling representing th effects of irreversible particle deposition inside membrane pores. The original model was extended to account for cake detachment, back- flushing, and dependency of soluble microbial products (SMP) deposition on permeate flux. The model was identified on two sets of data from two experiments: a short-term flux stepping experiment under fluxes higher from the ‘threshold flux’ and a long-term filtration experiment under fluxes not exceeding the ‘threshold flux’. Additionally, the paper proposes a simple ‘pen and ruler’ identification method for unique estimation of model parameters based on the information obtained from flux stepping experiments