Enhanced Removal of Organic and Inorganic Pollutants using Electrooxidation Integrated Membrane Bioreactor (IMBR) and validation through Lumped Parameter Kinetic modelling with thermodynamic parameter exploration in Pharmaceutical Wastewater Treatment

Abstract

Abstract The occurrence of fouling in Membrane Bioreactors (MBRs).reduces the performance of the system can be overcome by integrating electro-oxidation process in which different applied current density (CD) have been investigated. The optimal CD was 0.748 A/m2 which was suitable for the long-time operation of IMBR and observed that the removal percentile for total organic compounds (TOC), chemical oxygen demand (COD) was above 90% with total dissolved solids (TDS) of 60% at 400kPa constant pressure. Scanning electron micrographs (SEM) showed less void volume and pore constriction and the increase in permeate flux was 45% with extended backwashing time of 140 minutes. The fouling mechanism also verified by Hermia models, lumped parameter kinetic modelling and thermodynamic parameter with activation energy estimation exhibits lesser internal fouling of standard error 0.00459, 58.296 kJ/mol, − 0.1191 kJ/mol, 94.621 kJ/mol, 52.428 kJ/mol and the observed results and more reliable and feasible. The most striking observations in this study were that IMBR can be operated without the problem of filamentous bulking, and electro-oxidation significantly alternated the structural and morphological sludge flocs. The results implied that electro-oxidation might be the key factor for the success in fouling mitigation in IMBR.