Influencing Factors on Sensitivity of Pressure Decay Test for Membrane Damage Assessment

Abstract

Pressurized membrane module systems, including hollow fiber type of Microfiltration (MF) and Ultrafiltration (UF) membranes are being increasingly used in drinking water treatment due to their high removal efficiency of pathogen. However, when fibers are damaged in pressurized membrane system, the pathogen will be able to penetrate the membrane. Therefore, it is essential to guarantee the regulatory requirements for water quality by an effective on-line or off-line condition integrity monitoring methods. Recently, pressure decay test (PDT) which is one of membrane integrity tests has been reflected to drinking water treatment plants using pressurized membrane module. In this paper, three different method were used to perform PDT and three different sensitivity values were analyzed through experiments. Three types of direct integrity test methods were applied to pressure feed side, filtrate side and bidirectional pressure decay test. The results of these experiments show that the sensitivity was increasing when the volume of pressurized gas was decreasing. The sensitivity is inversely proportional to the gas volume. Furthermore, it is desirable to increase pressure difference between feed side and permeate side in order to achieve higher sensitivity in the PDT by membrane damage.