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The City of San Diego, California, was awarded a grant in October 1998 from theBureau of Reclamation to investigate the feasibility of using membranebioreactors (MBRs) for water reclamation. Based on the findings of the firstphase of the project, the project team concluded that a parallel comparison ofcommercially available MBR systems needed to be evaluated at pilot-scale. Twosubmerged MBR systems, manufactured by Zenon Environmental Systems, Inc. andMitsubishi Rayon Corporation, were evaluated at the Aqua 2000 Research Center inEscondido, California. The project was designed to evaluate the feasibility ofusing MBR permeate treating municipal wastewater as a feed source for thin filmcomposite reverse osmosis (RO) membranes. The first part of the project wasdedicated to operating both MBRs in a nitrification and denitrification mode.After completion of Part 1 of the project, both MBR systems were retrofitted andoperated in a nitrification only mode. Throughout both parts of the study, theeffluent from each MBR was fed to two separate, single stage RO pilot systems.Both the Zenon and Mitsubishi MBR systems showed high biological oxygen demand(BOD) removal with values below the detection limit, and significant totalorganic carbon (TOC) reduction. The effluent turbidities from the MBRs wereconsistently less than 0.1 NTU. Both MBRs also produced a high quality effluentthat could be used by thin film composite RO membranes. Although the MBR systemsdid not show inorganic nitrogen removal at all points of the study, a betteraeration system design would have improved removals. Includes 9 references, table, figures.

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Edition: Vol. - No. Published: 05/01/2001 Number of Pages: 20 File Size: 1 file , 370 KB