Identification of gas sparging regimes for granular anaerobic membrane bioreactor to enable energy neutral municipal wastewater treatment

In this study, conventional and novel gas sparging regimes have been evaluated for a municipal wastewater granular anaerobic MBR to identify how best to achieve high sustainable fluxes whilst simultaneously conserving energy demand. Using continuous gas sparging in combination with continuous filtration, flux was strongly dependent upon shear rate, which imposed a considerable energy demand. Intermittent gas sparging was subsequently evaluated to reduce energy demand whilst delivering an analogous shear rate. For a flux of 5 L m-2 h-1, a fouling rate below 1 mbar h-1 was sustained with low gas sparging frequency and gas sparging rates. However, to sustain low fouling rates for fluxes above 10 L m-2 h-1, a gas sparging frequency of 50 % (i.e. 10 s on/10 s off) and an increase in gas sparging rate is needed, indicating the importance of shear rate and gas sparging frequency. An alternative gas sparging regime was subsequently tested in which filtration was conducted without gas sparging, followed by membrane relaxation for a short period coupled with gas sparging, to create a pseudo dead-end filtration cycle. Fouling characterisation evidenced considerable cake fouling rates of 200-250 mbar h-1 within each filtration cycle. However, long term fouling transient analysis demonstrated low residual fouling resistance, suggesting the cake formed during filtration was almost completely reversible, despite operating at a flux of 15 L m-2 h-1, which was equivalent or higher than the critical flux of the suspension. It is therefore asserted that by operating filtration in the absence of shear, fouling is less dependent upon the preferential migration of the sub-micron particle fraction and is instead governed by the compressibility of the heterogeneous cake formed, which enables higher operational fluxes to be achieved. Comparison of energy demand for the three gas sparging regimes to the energy recovered from municipal wastewater AnMBR demonstrated that only by using dead-end filtration can energy neutral wastewater treatment be realised which is the ultimate ambition for the technology.