Grant: Alliance Grants

By integrating membrane filtration and biodegradation into one system, membrane bioreactors (MBRs) can achieve excellent treatment performance with very small footprint and reduced sludge production. Due to the high costs and complexity of MBRs using traditional membranes, dynamic membrane bioreactors (DMBR) have gained increasingly more attention from the research community. Dynamic membranes (DMs) can be made with inexpensive materials, such as nylon and stainless-steel mesh. The deposition of solids and growth of microorganisms on the DMs will eventually form a dynamic cake-layer that can be equivalent to microfiltration (MF) or even ultrafiltration (UF) membranes. In our ongoing NSERC Alliance project, a granular sludge-DMBR (GS-DMBR) is being developed for sustainable wastewater treatment and reuse in the Canadian Prairie climate, in which we found that DMs are very promising but traditional DMs are challenging to be made in the laboratory with high quality, flexibility in design, and consistency. In this application, we aim at fabricating inexpensive yet robust membranes by 3D-printing. The localized and global configuration of the membrane module will be designed to optimize the hydrodynamic conditions in the reactor and minimize fouling propensity. The outcomes of this project will not only benefit the partners but also be applicable to wastewaters in other sectors, such as food processing wastewater, and landfill leachate.