A membrane-integrated advanced scheme for treatment of industrial wastewater: Dynamic modeling towards scale up

• Mathematical model developed for an advanced integrated water treatment plant.
• Highly integrated scheme is novel in ensuring by-product recovery and water reuse.
• Model successfully predicted plant performance.
• Study will facilitate industrial scale up of this new and advanced scheme.

Modeling and simulation was carried out for an advanced membrane-integrated hybrid treatment process that ensures reuse of water with conversion and recovery of ammoniacal nitrogen as value-added struvite fertilizer from coke wastewater. While toxic cyanide was largely removed in a pre-chemical treatment unit using Fenton’s reagents under optimized conditions, more than 95% of NH4+–N could be recovered as a valuable by-product called struvite through addition of appropriate doses of magnesium and phosphate salts. Water could be turned reusable through a polishing treatment by nanofiltration membranes in a largely fouling free membrane module following a biodegradation step. Mathematical modeling of such an integrated process was done with Haldane–Andrew approach for the associated microbial degradation of phenol by Pseudomonas putida  . Residual NH4+ was degraded by nitrification and denitrification following the modified Monod kinetics. The model could successfully predict the plant performance as reflected in reasonably low relative error (0.03–0.18) and high Willmott d-index (>0.98).