Membrane Bioreactors for Produced Water Treatment: A Mini-Review

Abstract

Environmentalists are prioritizing reuse, recycling, and recovery systems to meet rising water demand. Diving into produced water treatment to enable compliance by the petroleum industry to meet discharge limits has increased research into advanced treatment technologies. The integration of biological degradation of pollutants and membrane separation has been recognized as a versatile technology in dealing with produced water with strength of salts, minerals, and oils being produced during crude refining operation. This review article presents highlights on produced water, fundamental principles of membrane bioreactors (MBRs), advantages of MBRs over conventional technologies, and research progress in the application of MBRs in treating produced water. Having limited literature that specifically addresses MBRs for PW treatment, this review also attempts to elucidate the treatment efficiency of MBRs PW treatment, integrated MBR systems, general fouling, and fouling mitigation strategies.

Energy-Efficient AnMBRs Technology for Treatment of Wastewaters: A Review

“…This review is motivated by the progress that was made in the research and applications of AnMBRs in recent years. It is worth noting that several review articles on the MBR technology have recently been published [39,45,[58][59][60][61][62]. Nevertheless, to the best of the authors knowledge, the present paper is the first to gain detailed insight into the status of AnMBRs as the energy-efficient technology for the treatment of municipal and domestic wastewaters.…”

“…Nowadays, a common way to use microfiltration (MF) and ultrafiltration (UF) membranes for the wastewater treatment is to combine them into membrane bioreactor technology [63], which itself has proven effective in removing both organic and inorganic contaminants as well as microorganisms from various solutions and suspensions. In general, MBR is defined as a combination of a biological reactor and selective membrane process responsible for physical separation in a simplified single unit [59,64].…”

“…Importantly, the placement of the membrane module has the significant impact on the energy consumption in the long-term AnMBRs operation [120]. It was reported that the energy requirement for the operation of submerged AnMBRs is significantly lower than that for AnMBRs with an external membrane module [48,59,86,121]. For instance, Martin et al [48] have presented a direct comparison of external and immersed membrane operation in both flocculated and upflow anaerobic sludge blanket (UASB) AnMBRs used for treating domestic wastewaters.…”

“…Roughly speaking, it leads to several critical obstacle limiting the AnMBRs operation. Indeed, it was reported that the fouling causes low productivity, frequent membrane cleaning, increase in the energy requirement, reduced the membrane lifespan as well as an increased system downtime [59,88,121,126]. As reported by Shin and Bae [78] the energy demand for the fouling control accounts for more than 70% of the total energy consumption of AnMBRs technology.…”

Pollutant Removal and Energy Recovery from Swine Wastewater Using Anaerobic Membrane Bioreactor: A Comparative Study with Up-Flow Anaerobic Sludge Blanket

“…As a novel and effective AD process, anaerobic membrane bioreactors (AnMBRs) have attracted increasing interest in recent years due to their high pollutants removal efficiency and energy recovery rate [13][14][15]. They have many advantages such as smaller reactor size without the need of sedimentation tank resulting in smaller footprint, no limitations on suspended solid content of the mixed liquor, easy control of solid retention time which enhances the quality of the treated water, excluding tertiary treatment, and energy efficient application [15][16][17]. To develop this technique, researchers have explored the pollutant removal performance, fouling mechanisms, membrane materials and reactor configurations with various wastewaters under different operating conditions in lab-scale studies and practical cases [18][19][20].…”