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Biofouling Potential Reductions Using a Membrane Hybrid System as a Pre-treatment to Seawater Reverse Osmosis

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Abstract

Biofouling on reverse osmosis (RO) membranes is the most serious problem which affects desalination process efficiency and increases operation cost. The biofouling cannot be effectively removed by the conventional pre-treatment traditionally used in desalination plants. Hybrid membrane systems coupling the adsorption and/or coagulation with low-pressure membranes can be a sustainable pre-treatment in reducing membrane fouling and at the same time improving the feed water quality to the seawater reverse osmosis. The addition of powder activated carbon (PAC) of 1.5 g/L into submerged membrane system could help to remove significant amount of both hydrophobic compounds (81.4%) and hydrophilic compounds (73.3%). When this submerged membrane adsorption hybrid system (SMAHS) was combined with FeCl3 coagulation of 0.5 mg of Fe3+/L, dissolved organic carbon removal efficiency was excellent even with lower dose of PAC (0.5 g/L). Detailed microbial studies conducted with the SMAHS and the submerged membrane coagulation–adsorption hybrid system (SMCAHS) showed that these hybrid systems can significantly remove the total bacteria which contain also live cells. As a result, microbial adenosine triphosphate (ATP) as well as total ATP concentrations in treated seawater and foulants was considerably decreased. The bacteria number in feed water prior to RO reduced from 5.10E+06 cells/mL to 3.10E+03 cells/mL and 9.30E+03 cells/mL after SMAHS and SMCAHS were applied as pre-treatment, respectively. These led to a significant reduction of assimilable organic carbon (AOC) by 10.1 μg/L acetate-C when SMCAHS was used as a pre-treatment after 45-h RO operation. In this study, AOC method was modified to measure the growth of bacteria in seawater by using the Pseudomonas P.60 strain.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the National Centre of Excellence in Desalination (Membrane flocculation hybrid system as pre-treatment to brackish and sea water reverse osmosis desalination system, project code 07633) and a grant (07SeaHeroA01-01) from the Plant Technology Advancement Program funded by the Ministry of Land, Transport and Maritime Affairs of the Korea Government.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Engineering and IT, University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), P.O. Box 123, Broadway, NSW 2007, Sydney, Australia

    Sanghyun Jeong, Tien Vinh Nguyen & Saravanamuthu Vigneswaran

  2. School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST), 261 Oryong-dong, Buk-gu, Gwangju, 500-712, Korea

    Lan Hee Kim, Sung-Jo Kim & In S. Kim

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  1. Sanghyun Jeong
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  2. Lan Hee Kim
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  3. Sung-Jo Kim
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  4. Tien Vinh Nguyen
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  5. Saravanamuthu Vigneswaran
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  6. In S. Kim
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Correspondence to Saravanamuthu Vigneswaran.

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Jeong, S., Kim, L.H., Kim, SJ. et al. Biofouling Potential Reductions Using a Membrane Hybrid System as a Pre-treatment to Seawater Reverse Osmosis. Appl Biochem Biotechnol 167, 1716–1727 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12010-011-9514-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12010-011-9514-6

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