| Summary: | Due to the rapidly increasing world population as well as the increasing demand of water discharge, many researches have been conducted to discover technology for wastewater treatment. Membrane filtration process is becoming popular due to its room for improvement, relative cheap operating cost and capability of removing bacteria, microorganisms, particulates, and organic matters, which can cause colour, taste, and odours in water. Hence, it has been widely used in wastewater treatment. In this report, the optimization of fouling control and improvement in operating pressure in SMBR by the combination of vibration and aeration were studied. All the experiments were carried out in a submerged membrane bioreactor under the following parameters: constant permeate flux of 25 LMH and reactor temperature of 25±2oC. The results show that the membrane filtration with additional mechanical vibration provided allows the operation to continue for a longer duration of 258.9% compared to without mechanical vibration, while only 6.72% longer duration of experiment was achieved with higher air flow rate. However, high vibration frequency means more energy consumed. It is therefore important to optimize the vibration frequency in order to reduce the operating cost while maximize the profit. It has also been observed that the hollow fibre membrane has poor mechanical strength and durability. Hence, more studies are required to be conducted to produce membrane with stronger mechanical strength.
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