Study on various pretreatment processes in membrane bioreactor for tannery wastewater treatment to reduce biofouling

Abstract

Many industries have adopted the practice of discharging hazardous contaminants into fresh water. Because of a lack of fundamental understanding about the adverse consequences of these toxic chemicals, industries are releasing them without any pre-treatment. Toxic contaminants deteriorated the quality of available water and triggered lethal damage to aquatic organisms and humans because of this long-term discharge activity. Among the numerous industries, tannery industry plays a vital role in generating huge amount of wastewater each year. The discharged water from tannery industries contains numerous toxic pollutants and most of them are hazardous and carcinogenic in nature. Hence, it is important to treat the industrial effluents properly before discharging them into the landfills or into the water stream. The stringent nature of toxic compounds present in the water makes the task complex for conventional treatment methods thereby failing to treat the industrial effluent that meets the industrial discharge standards. newlineMembrane bioreactor (MBR) considered as a greener technology, emerged as the preferred alternative for conventional methods due to their efficacy and high reliability. MBR mainly consists of activated sludge process along with microfiltration process resulting in low consumption of space for operation. MBR exhibits many advantages over conventional activated sludge process such as high quality of treated water, efficacy to handle high organic load and lesser sludge production. In spite of exhibiting, various advantages MBR possess a major drawback of fouling which restricts its use widely. newline