A pilot application of recycled discarded RO membranes for low strength gray water reclamation
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PROCESSES FOR WATER ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT PLATFORMS
A pilot application of recycled discarded RO membranes for low strength gray water reclamation Jawwad Ahmed 1 & Yousuf Jamal 1 Received: 30 December 2019 / Accepted: 4 October 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Reuse of recycled RO membranes after oxidative treatment as ultrafiltration membranes promise to bring membrane filtration at par with conventional treatment processes in terms of cost-effectiveness. Although the treatment process in which discarded RO membranes are converted into ultrafiltration membranes is well documented, limited pilot data are available for their application in different filtration applications. This research gap is felt because most commercially available RO membranes are spiral, wound while the ultrafiltration membranes commonly used for water filtration applications are hollow fiber. Pilot-scale data will help to develop performance guidelines and predict fouling characteristics of different types of feed waters. In the current paper, converted RO membranes are subjected to filtration with domestic gray water as the feed source. The results show that the converted membranes performed at par with conventional filtration while also providing a consistent filtrate turbidity of < 1 NTU. The reduction in cost and physical footprints and recycling of membranes that would otherwise have ended up in landfills are added advantages that makes this an attractive proposition for gray water filtration applications. Keywords Gray water . Reclamation . Recycled RO membranes . Ultrafiltration
Introduction Reverse osmosis (RO) accounts for the major share of the global desalination market, with the thin-film composite (TFC) membranes with polyamide (PA) as the active layer holding two-thirds of the share in terms of the total installed capacity (García-Pacheco et al. 2018; Virgili et al. 2016). After use in brackish and seawater desalination plants, over 840,000 end-of-life RO membranes are annually discarded (Landaburu-Aguirre et al. 2016). Conventionally the discarded RO membranes are disposed of in landfills or incinerated, but recent studies have highlighted the potential of treating these used membranes for reuse in ultrafiltration (UF) applications. This potential is most appealing for
Responsible Editor: Angeles Blanco * Yousuf Jamal [email protected] 1
Institute of Environmental Sciences and Engineering (IESE), School of Civil and Environmental Engineering (SCEE), National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Islamabad 44000, Pakistan
developing countries, where membranes—both RO and UF—are exclusively imported. The potential to recycle used RO membranes as UF membranes has been identified at least as early as 2002 by Rodriquez et al. They carried out tests on used sea water RO membrane elements by treating them with different oxidants, primarily potassium permanganate, to peel off the active PA layer from the RO membrane (Rodríguez et al. 2002). Veza and Rodriguez-Gonzalez
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