Membrane fouling behavior in anaerobic baffled membrane bioreactor under static operating condition

• The membrane filtration was combined with anaerobic baffled reactor.
• The ABMBR without turbulence intensifying strategy was developed.
• Membrane fouling developed slowly under static operating condition.
• The polysaccharide accounted for 79.12% of total area of filter cake.
• Submicron particles in supernatant were the source of fouling in ABMBR.

A novel AnMBR combined with ABR as the anaerobic baffled membrane bioreactor (ABMBR) was developed for membrane fouling mitigation without any turbulence intensifying strategy to reduce the energy consumption further. The filtration time of this system lasted 14–25 days under stable condition only with back-flushing every 48 h. The polysaccharide accounted for 6.85 ± 3.1% amount of total filter cake and the protein accounted for 4.12 ± 2.1%, which took 79.12% and 11.12% of total area in laser scanning confocal microscope (CLSM) image. After filtration, 83.72 ± 10.97% of turbidity, 59.28 ± 16.46% of polysaccharide, 16.51% of tryptophan and 37.61% of humic-like substrates were rejected, respectively. The total membrane resistance at the end of each cycle was (4.47 ± 0.99) × 1013 m−1. And the resistance from filter cake was (4.15 ± 1.00) × 1013 m−1, which accounted for of 92.6 ± 3.4% of total membrane resistance.

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