Experimental study on non-woven filamentous fibre micro-filter with high filtration speed

Abstract

A laboratory study was undertaken to pursue the filter performance of a micro-filter module employing highly porous fibre media under a high filtration rate (≥1,500 m/day), faster than that of any conventional filter process. The effects of filtration rate, head loss, raw water turbidity, and filter aid chemicals on filter performance were analysed. In spite of the extremely high filtration rate, the filter achieved an attractive efficiency, reducing the raw water turbidity by over 80%. As with other filter systems, the filter aid used ((polyaluminium chloride (PAC)) greatly affected the performance of this particular fibre filter. Long-term repetitive runs were additionally carried out to confirm the reproducibility of the filter performance. Also, a comparison was carried out with other high-rate filter systems which are either being tested for use in experimental studies, or are already commercially available. This study reveals that the filter performance under a high filtration speed is still attractive especially as PAC is used. Due to the high porosity of the fibre, the filter had small head loss even though the filtration rate was high. These results ascertain that it is possible to operate the filters with high filtration rate achieving reliable treatment performance.

Development of model equation for estimating the turbidity reduction in sediment-laden stormwater by a synthetic fiber fence

“…To comply to more stringent regulations, a nonwoven filamentous fiber filter which was recently developed for the separation of fine particles in water treatment (Niu et al 2015) was employed as a treatment unit and tested to the turbidity reduction capacity in a previous study (Yuan et al 2016). The transport and deposition of soil matters in filter media are phenomena relevant to numerous problems, which can affect the maintenance and restoration of low-turbidity stormwater discharge.…”

Physico‐Chemical Processes

“…In the second stage, the effluent from the first stage was introduced into a RO filtration system for the removal of nitrate. Niu et al (2015) fabricated a micro-filter module with a highly porous fiber media for the extremely high rate filtration. The results indicated the module could achieve long-term repetitive efficiency.…”