Submerged Membrane Bioreactor (SMBR) for Treatment of Textile Dye Wastewatertowards Developing Novel MBR Process

This paper deals with the application of a submerged membrane bioreactor (SMBR) with commercial membrane module and novel MBR modulefor the treatment of model textile dye wastewater (MTDW). For this work, MTDW was developed based on different publications and a pilot-scale automated SMBR unit was applied to carry out the tests with this model wastewater. The system is on the way to be upgraded to attain novel MBR module replacing the applied commercial membrane by novel membrane materials which have been developed by the European Commission funded project “BioNexGen” [1]. The hydraulic volume of the employed SMBR reactor was 57 L. One flat sheet commercial MBR module was submerged in the reactor. The module consisted of 3 sheets, with 25 cm × 25 cm dimensions of each sheet covering total active membrane area of 0.33 m2. To reach the target, different MBR process parameters like COD, BOD, TOC, pH, conductivity, flux, TMP, MLSS, colour contents, air supply, O2 consumption, HRT, SRT, drying residue, nutrients etc. have been investigated. It is reported that under the operating conditions of permeate flux of 4 L/m2h, around 50 mbar of TMP, 12 g/L of MLSS, 40-80 h of HRT, 1.0 m3/h of air supply to MBR reactor, pH of 8.2 ± 0.2- 10.5 ± 0.2 and temperature of 18 ± 2 °C, the COD removal efficiency was around 90% for 2450 mg/L inlet COD fed to the membrane bioreactor and Red and Blue colour removal efficiencies were 25-70% and 20-50% respectively. In order to develop novel MBR process, a novel MBR module has already been applied replacing the commercial one and the preliminary results are reported.