Evaluating RO performance with biological pretreatment of graywater

Journal of Water Reuse and Desalination

Morse, Audra¹  Song, Lianfa¹  Crawley, Jason¹  Jackson, W. Andrew¹  Anderson, Todd² 

[1] Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Texas Tech University, Box 41023, Lubbock TX 79409–1023, USA;Department of Environmental Toxicity, The Institute for Environmental and Human Health, Texas Tech University, Box 41023, Lubbock TX 79409–1023, USA

关键词: flux;    graywater;    resistance;    reverse osmosis;    space;   

DOI  :  10.2166/wrd.2012.075

学科分类：工程和技术（综合）

来源: IWA Publishing

【 摘 要 】

Reverse osmosis (RO) is a treatment technology that may be used for the recovery of graywater terrestrially as well as the recovery of wastewater on board long duration, manned space flights. As with terrestrial RO applications, concentration polarization and membrane fouling lead to decreased productivity and increased energy demands with time. Physiochemical and biological pretreatment options can enhance the performance of the RO system; also, biological pretreatment has the advantages of low energy and consumable requirements as compared to other physiochemical pretreatment options. To determine the degree to which the incorporation of biological treatment enhances RO performance, a series of bench-scale experiments were performed. Observed resistances indicate that biological pretreatment alleviated the degree of non-reversible fouling while also improving the rate of permeate flux in a downstream RO process to further treat water. Results also indicated that enhanced urea hydrolysis, pH reduction, and carbon oxidation serve as the primary benefits of biological pretreatment of space-based graywater. The observations of this study may also benefit engineers considering the treatment of graywaters for terrestrial water-reuse applications.

【 授权许可】

CC BY-NC-ND