Abstract
This study thus looks into two treatment processess : i) Anaerobic digester coupled with hollow fibre membrane unit. Treatment of starch waste with anaerobic digester-membrane system was studied. $0.17\m^2$ area of hollow fibre membrane unit of known pore size was immersed into laboratory-scale anaerobic digestion system. The pore size of membrane was varied from 0.03 to $\0.15mu$m. The hydraulic retention time of anaerobic digester was varied from 1.5 to 10 days. The effect of hydraulic retention time on treatment efficiency was significant while effect of membrane size was not significant. The gas production was about 0.74㎥/kg COD treated. The COD removal efficient was about 80-95% depending on the hydraulic retention time. ii ) Crossflow ultrafiltration as post treatment to anaerobic filter. The effluent from anaerobic filter, which had a total COD in the range of 4,500-5,200 mg/L was treated by crossflow ultrafiltration units. The study conducted with different membrane pore size indicated that membrace with 1,000,000 molecular weight cut-off size gave a higher COD removal efficiency in the range of 83-87% while giving a study flux of $120-130 L/\m^2$.h. A study was conducted to see the long term clogging effect of membrane also.
