Development of the wastewater reclamation and reusing system with a submerged membrane bioreactor combined bio-filtration Original Research Article

Recently there have been many wastewater treatment processes combining different units of process to improve the dissolving and suspension of pollutants in water. The submerged membrane bioreactor (SMBR) system uses a membrane that can produce high quality water for reusing with minimal land demand, instead of using secondary clarifier as biological treatment, sand filters, ozonation, GAC or disinfection processes as a tertiary treatment. For the development of the bio-filter membrane bioreactor (BMB) system as a submerged membrane bioreactor in this study the new wastewater treatment system will consist of a rapid bio-filter clarifier, a bioreactor and a hollow fiber membrane and plate membrane, to help find the optimal process to meet the regulations for reused water. This study was performed to evaluate the BMB reusing system, made up of a rapid bio-filter clarifier, an activated sludge bioreactor and a membrane module. The rapid bio-filter clarifier replaced a conventional primary sedimentation and removed SS, BOD and COD to 40, 20, and 20%, while the turbidity and color were removed by 30 and 10% respectively. This means that the rapid bio-filter clarifier having an HRT value 5.2 min can replace the conventional primary sedimentation of the HRT value of 1.5–2.5 h. Also the BMB reusing system could achieve the effluent quality of BOD < 5 mg/L, COD < 10 mg/L, turbidity < 0.5 NTU, and color < 20 unit respectively, and total coliforms did not appear. This means this system can meet water quality standard for water reusing systems. The flux of the plate membrane and hollow Fiber membrane were 120–140 L/m2 h bar and 60–90 L/m2 h bar; much more water could permeate the plate type membrane than hollow fiber type membrane. Plus the total resistance of hollow fiber type membrane was higher than plate type membrane.