A Study Of Operational Factors For Reducing The Fouling Of Hollow Fiber Membranes During Wastewater Filtration

Fouling of membranes is the most important problem in wastewater filtration since the sustainability of the process is highly influenced by the fouling rate. Possible ways for fouling control are through feed water pre-treatment, operational conditions and membrane cleaning. This paper studies the operational conditions that affect the fouling of hollow fiber ultrafiltration membranes during the separation of wastewater. Specifically, several factors which are temperature, pressure, time, pH and surface area of membrane, are studied. The Design of Experiments methodology is used to investigate the effect the factors. The results of this study help to reduce the fouling of membranes, thus contributing to a more sustainable filtration system. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.