Wastewater reuse as a sustainable, reliable and energy recovery concept is a promising approach to alleviate worldwide water scarcity. However, the water reuse market needs to be developed with long-term efforts because only less than 4% of the total wastewater worldwide has been treated for water reuse at present. In addition, the reclaimed water should fulfill the criteria of health safety, appearance, environmental acceptance and economic feasibility based on their local water reuse guidelines. Moreover, municipal wastewater as an alternative water resource for non-potable or potable reuse, has been widely treated by various membrane-based treatment processes for reuse applications. By collecting lab-scale and pilot-scale reuse cases as much as possible, this review aims to provide a comprehensive summary of the membrane-based treatment processes, mainly focused on the hydraulic filtration performance, contaminants removal capacity, reuse purpose, fouling resistance potential, resource recovery and energy consumption. The advances and limitations of different membrane-based processes alone or coupled with other possible processes such as disinfection processes and advanced oxidation processes, are also highlighted. Challenges still facing membrane-based technologies for water reuse applications, including institutional barriers, financial allocation and public perception, are stated as areas in need of further research and development.
Gamification is a widespread phenomenon that relies on using game mechanics in other areas, such as the learning situation. One of the most exciting types of games in the late 2010s is escape games, where the principle is for the players to manage to escape from a room in which they are locked by finding hidden items and following a sequence of puzzles. The goal of using this type of game is to motivate/involve learners, to make them work and develop adaptability and responsiveness skills. Unfortunately, these escape games are only practiced in small groups, and the design is expensive and time-consuming. That is why cost-effective alternatives are proposed in this paper. They are either dematerialized, entirely based on a digital medium (smartphone/tablets/computer), or directly created by students, also with a digital medium, allowing integration into large classes, or at open house events.
HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.
Women are increasingly present in the field of engineering, and despite a significant female presence, it has been found that the programmes continue to make no reference to women scientists. In chemical engineering, for example, all the names of scientists mentioned in the programmes belong to men only. To test this hypothesis of the overrepresentation of men in the programmes, a series of random opinion surveys were launched among 600 students from 5 universities to find out whether they had noticed this over-representation and what they thought about it. The results showed that the vast majority did not realize that the scientists presented as examples in classes were all men. In fact, 90% of the student panel were unable to identify a woman in the chemical engineering field, and the remaining 10% could cite only one or two -who were among the most recent and had received most attention from the media. The issue of inequalities between girls and boys and between women and men in education remains central to understanding and combating gender inequalities and to enabling people to develop as persons free from the limitations imposed on them by gender stereotypes. However, these inequalities cannot be explained exclusively by the issue of access to education but must also take the type and content of education into account. This article is a call for reflection on the content of university curricula and has a twofold objective: on the one hand, to raise awareness of this imbalance in representation among students, both male and female, and, on the other hand, to launch reflection on this "invisibility of women" and to propose some avenues for debate.
Breweries release significant amounts of wastewater loaded with various organic and mineral materials. Prior studies of membrane bioreactor (MBR) wastewater treatment have been conducted with very little interest granted to the conditions of biomass acclimation. This study displays biomass behavior during brewery wastewater treatment by an aerobic MBR. In addition, nanofiltration and electrodialysis have been studied as potential post-treatment to decrease mineral concentrations and permit further water reuse for agriculture. An anoxic/aerobic laboratory MBR, associated with a flat sulfonated polyether membrane was used for synthetic brewery wastewater treatment. Biomass acclimation was performed using a feeding substrate. Organic concentrations in the MBR influent varied from 700 mg COD/L to 10,600 mg COD/L (COD: chemical oxygen demand) for 110 days. The results indicate a good acclimation to effluent with high salts and organic matter loads. Steady evolution of biomass concentration and activities was achieved after 90 days of operation. A reduction of COD of around 95% was obtained with MBR and up to 99% with nanofiltration post-treatment for the reconstructed brewery effluent with an organic loading rate of 7 g COD/L·d and a solid and hydraulic retention time of 30 days and 36 hours. A good reduction of the salt content was also recorded primarily with the nanofiltration and electrodialysis processes.
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