Optimization of Cleaning Procedure for Polyethersulfone (PES) Membrane by a Statistically Designed Approach

Physical separation methods, especially membrane technology, can be a good substitute for biological wastewater treatment, due to its simple constructions and operations. There are many papers and patents in this field. Membranes need to be cleaned periodically to be able to operate economically, and need to be replaced after a while. Several factors can influence the membrane cleaning procedure, including pressure of backwash, acid and base concentration, duration of forward washing, and duration of acid-base backwashing. In this study the effect of these parameters was investigated to find an optimum condition which could result in a good polyethersulphone (PES) membrane cleaning with less material and energy consumption. To reach this goal, a design of experiment (DoE) method termed 25-1 fractional factorial design (FFD) was used to specify the best conditions and modeling the results.