Pre-treatment Options for Hybrid Ceramic Microfiltration Systems for Surface Water Treatment

Membrane filtration is one of the alternatives suggested for the future drinking water production. Worldwide, the total number of ceramic membrane usage for water treatment is increasing swiftly and this is the first ceramic filtration study which is applied to a surface water treatment in a tropical region. This study was conducted to investigate the removals of natural organic matter and pathogens and, the fouling behaviour of the ceramic microfiltration system (CMF) when combined with the pre-treatments namely coagulation-flocculation and adsorption. Further, this study was carried out for three different scenarios namely: direct CMF (Scenario 1), coagulation-flocculation (PACl) CMF (Scenario 2), and coagulation-flocculation (PACl) and adsorption (PAC) CMF (Scenario 3). The outcome of the study revealed that the suspended solid, total coliform and fecal coliform were removed completely in all three scenarios. However, the removal efficiency on Giardia and Cryptosporidium was the highest (99.92%) with scenario 3 when compared with that of the other two scenarios. In addition, both the highest TOC and DOC removals were noted as above 80% with scenario 3. The fouling behaviour of the system varied with the scenarios, and long filtration period and high TMP recovery were achieved with the third scenario.