Ilca: In-line Coagulation and Adsorption for Pre- Treatment to Ceramic Microfiltration

The use of ceramic low pressure membranes for drinking water production has been increasing in the past decades. However, fouling during membrane operations is still a challenging topic that requires attention and investigation. During filtration of surface water, a major contribution to fouling is attributed to the presence of dissolved organic carbon(DOC) and its fractions which comprise biopolymers and small, neutral, hydrophilic compounds (Kimura et al., 2014). Feed water composition and its characteristics determine to a large extent membrane fouling (Lee et al., 2004; Zheng et al., 2015). Still, the impact of organic compounds on membrane operations can be minimized controlling the feed water composition with optimized pre-treatment (Shorney-Darby et al., 2014; Zheng et al., 2016, 2015). Particularly the impact of DOC on membrane operations can be minimized by controlling the feed water composition with coagulation processes (Meyn et al., 2012) which are one of the most applied pre-treatment for microfiltration at full scale (Huang et al., 2009). Nonetheless conventional in-line coagulation/flocculation treatment can require a relatively long contact time resulting in an increase of the footprint size of the membrane treatment facility (Rockey et al., 2016). Here we present an innovative design for in-line coagulation absorption (ILCA) that provides the same fouling control of the conventional in-line coagulation system.