Evaluation of GE Water & Process Technology’s UF Membrane at Various Water Quality Parameters

The main limitation of the ultrafiltration (UF) process in drinking water treatment is membrane fouling. This constant-flux, pilot-scale research evaluates General Electrics (GE) Water & Process Technology’s UF211/UFC211 membrane at various source water conditions such as different humic acid (HA) concentrations, turbidity, pH, alkalinity and calcium ion concentrations. Different backwashing intervals were also tested to see what effects backwashing has on membrane fouling. Membrane performance was evaluated in terms of pilot plant run time and the resulting foulants were characterized. The results show that humic acid fouls membrane by adsorption and pore blocking while bentonite is mainly responsible for forming a cake layer on the surface of the membrane. pH and alkalinity did not affect the membrane performance. High calcium concentrations were found to change HA characteristics dramatically and GE’s UF membrane was found to be incapable of filtering out this transformed HA. Shorter Backwashing interval improved backwashing efficiency. However, presence of calcium dramatically reduced backwashing efficiency. For further applications, these results can be used to optimize the best operating configurations for a filtering unit to process source water of different qualities.