• Journal of Korean Society of Water and Wastewater
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• v.24 no.6
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• pp.723-734
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• 2010

With a belief of high water quality production and less chemical usage, membrane technology including Microfiltration (MF), Ultrafiltration (UF), and Nanofiltration(NF) is being employed more and more in drinking water treatment process. However, due to higher energy consumption of UF and NF, MF is normally used for drinking water treatment especially in a plant of large scale. In this investigation, performance ofsand filtration and membrane filtration was compared regarding removal of various water quality parameters, such as TOC, DOC, KMnO4 consumption, THMFP, and HAAFP. Two lines of pilot plant have been operated, one of which line is a traditional advanced water treatment process which includes sedimentation, sand filtration, ozonation, and activated carbon, and the other line is an alternative treatment process which includes sedimentation with inclined plate, MF membrane, ozonation, and activated carbon. For the first about 4months of period, MF filtration showed similar or little bit higher performance than sand filtration. However, after about 4month later, sand filtration showed much higher performance in removing all parameters monitored in the investigation. It was found that sand filtration is a better option than MF filtration as far as microbial community is fully activated in sand filter bed.

• Proceedings of the Membrane Society of Korea Conference
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• 1999.10a
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• pp.93-116
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• 1999

MF membrane element was specially designed for water purification and VSA process which can solve the fouling problem. Especially VSA process is developed for the SK Chemicals' asymmetric microfiltration hollow fiber membranes. In case of outside-to-in filtration process, MF membrane element showed the excellent flux stability caused by cleaning ability of VSA process . Simultaneous back-washing with VSA consideratbly enhances cleaning efficiency. From the result the possibility of the replacement of chemical coagulation and sand filtration process with newly developed VSA process was revealed.

• Journal of Korean Society of Environmental Engineers
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• v.35 no.12
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• pp.877-882
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• 2013

The application of ultrafiltration (UF) and microfiltration (MF) membranes has been increased for drinking water purification. The advantages of UF/MF membrane process compared to conventional treatment processes are stable operation under varying feed water quality, smaller construction area, and automatic operation. Most membrane treatment plants are designed with polymeric membranes. Recently, some studies suggested that the process of treating surface water with ceramic membranes is competitive to the application of polymeric membranes. Higher water flux, less frequent cleaning, and much longer lifetime are the advantages of ceramic membrane comparing to polymeric membrane. Therefore, this research focused on the application of ceramic MF membrane pilot plant at the slow sand filtration plant. The ceramic membrane pilot plant has three trains that used raw water and sand filtered water as a feed water, respectively. For optimizing the pilot plant process, the coagulation with PACl coagulant was used as a pretreatment of ceramic membrane process. In addition, CEB (Chemical Enhanced Backwash) process using $H_2SO_4$ and NaOCl was used for 1.5 days, respectively. The experimental results showed that applying the optimum coagulant dose before membrane filtration showed enhancing membrane fluxes for both raw water and sand filtered water. Also, when using raw water as a feed of membrane, minimum fouling rate was 2.173 kPa/cycle with 25 mg/L of PACl and when using sand filtered water, the minimum fouling rate was 0.301 kPa/cycle with 5 mg/L of PACl.

• Proceedings of the Membrane Society of Korea Conference
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• 1999.07a
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• pp.63-66
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• 1999

MF membrane element was specially designed for water purification and VSA process which can solve the fouling problem. Especially VSA process is developed for the SK Chemical's asymmetric microfiltration hollow fiber membranes. In case of outside-to-in filtration process, MF membrane element showed the excellent flux stability caused by cleaning ability of VSA process. Simultaneous back- washing with VSA considerably enhances cleaning efficiency. Form the result, the possibility of the replacement of chemical coagulation and sand filtration process with newly developed VSA process was revealed.

• Proceedings of the Membrane Society of Korea Conference
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• 2001.11a
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• pp.3-10
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• 2001

• Journal of Korean Society of Water and Wastewater
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.598-607
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• 2004

In this study, the effects of two pre-treatment processes were observed prior to membrane filtration: pre-coagulation and pre-ozonation. To compare the effect of two above-mentioned pre-treatments, we adopted the four schemes: first one is direct membrane filtration of river surface water, second one is membrane filtration after pre-coagulation, third one is membrane filtration after pre-ozonation and fourth one is membrane filtration after pre-coagulation and pre-ozonation. There are two exceptional characteristics in applied processes. One is the usage of the MF membrane which has high ozone resisting characteristic. Therefore, ozone resides in membrane module during filtration. The other is adoption of Jet Mixed Separator (JMS) as coagulation-sedimentation process. The change in transmembrane pressure and permeate water quality were also examined. As a result, considering the filtration performance efficiency and permeate water quality, the process composed of filtration with combination of both pre-coagulation and pre-ozonation was proved most effective. The improved efficiency was due to the reduction of loading rate of fouling inducing materials to membrane module by coagulation process as well as variable reactions, such as degradation, particle destabilization and coagulation, occurred by residual ozone in membrane module. The additional effect of pre-coagulation before pre-ozonation is suppression of AOC, one of the by-products induced by ozonation. Therefore, combination of pre-coagulation and pre-ozonation is the effective process to overcome the major de-merit of ozonation i.e. by-products formation.

• Proceedings of the Membrane Society of Korea Conference
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• 2003.05a
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• pp.31-38
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• 2003

A pilot scale biofilter pretreatment-microfiltration system (BF-MF) was operated to investigate the effect of biofilter treatment in fouling reduction of microfiltration. Biofiltration was expected to reduce the membrane fouling by removal of turbidity and metal oxides. The hollow-fiber MF module with a nominal pore size of 0.1$\mu$m and a surface area of 8m$^2$ was submerged in a filtration tank and microfiltration was operated at a constant flux of 0.5 m/d. Biofiltration using polypropylene pellets was performed at a high filtration velocity of 320 m/d. Two experimental setups composed of MF and BF/MF, i.e., without and with biofilter pretreatment, were compared. Throughout the experimental period of 9 months, biofilter pretreatment was effective to reduce the membrane fouling, which was proved by the result of time variations of trans-membrane pressure and backwash conditions. The turbidity removal rate by biofiltration varied between 40% to 80% due to the periodic washing for biofilter contactor and raw water turbidity. In addition to turbidity, metals, especially Mn, Fe and Al were removed effectively with average removal rates of 89.2%, 67.8% and 64.9%, respectively. Further analysis of foulants on the used membranes revealed that turbidity and metal removal by biofiltration was the major effect of biofiltration pretreatment against microfiltration fouling.

• Journal of Korean Society of Environmental Engineers
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• v.36 no.7
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• pp.492-497
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• 2014

This study investigated removal characteristics of organic matters in pretreatment and reverse osmosis (RO) membrane processes for seawater desalination. Also, the influence of the changes in characteristics of organic matters on the membrane fouling was assessed. The pretreatment processes included dual media filtration (DMF), pressurized membrane filtration (MF), and submerged membrane filtration (SMF). Turbidity, UV absorption at 254 nm, dissolved organic carbon, size exclusion chromatography (SEC), fluorescence excitation emission matrix (FEEM), and transparent exopolymer particles (TEP) in raw and processed waters were analyzed. Ions and minerals were not removed by any pretreatment process tested, but were removed over 99% through the RO membrane process. Hydrophobic organics, which can play major role in organic membrane fouling, were relatively readily removed compared with hydrophilic ones. Membrane based pretreatment such as MF and SMF exhibited better removals of organics than conventional DMF. As the levels of organics in pretreated water decreased, the silt density index (SDI) decreased. MF treated water exhibited the lowest SDI value; this is possibly due to the lowest TEP ($0.1-0.4{\mu}m$) concentrations.

• Journal of Korean Society of Water and Wastewater
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• v.18 no.6
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• pp.770-777
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• 2004

Three pilot-scale membrane systems were operated using lake water as influent in this study. Microfiltration (MF) membrane with pore size of 0.01 m was used in Systen I of which filtration mode was set at constant pressure of $1kgf/cm^2$. Ultrafiltration (UF) membranes with molecular cutoff (MWCO) of 80,000 and 13,000 were used in System II-1 and II-2, respectively. Constant flow mode was applied at the range between 0.7 and $1.5m^3/m^2{\cdot}d$ (average of $1.1m^3/m^2${\cdot}d) for System II-1 and between 0.37 and $1.65m^3/m^2{\cdot}d$ (average of $1.18m^3/m^2{\cdot}d$) for System II-2. In System I, the flux changed from $1m^3/m^2{\cdot}d$ to $0.2m^3/m^2{\cdot}d$ during the operation time of 5 months. System II showed recovery of 94% under the allowable maximum pressure of $3kgf/cm^2$ during the same operation period. From these results, the efficient operation was observed in constant flow mode with respect to filtration time and recovery. Average filtrate turbidity showed 0.0071 NTU in System I and 0.0054 NTU in System II, which implied that high turbidity removal was obtained in both MF and UF systems with no significant difference between MF and UF. From the fact that membrane flux depends largely on membrane type and operation mode, a guideline of optimum design and operation should be suggested for application of membrane systems to full scale water treatment.

• Journal of Korean Society on Water Environment
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• v.22 no.6
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• pp.1052-1059
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• 2006

For monitoring the fecal pollution at Nak-Dong River, one of the eutrophicated rivers, the differences between total coliforms (TC) and fecal coliforms (FC) using both of membrane filtration (MF)/MPN method, and also fecal streptococcus (FS) by MF-method was investigated. To evaluate the correlation between TC, FC, and FS statistical analyses were performed by using Minitab. And a part of the presumptive TC/FC and background colonies was purified and identified using API 20E kit (Biomeriux). As results, most (89%) of presumptive FC by MF was identified as Escherichia coli while only 14% (MPN) and 11% (MF) of TC were identified as E. coli. Furthermore, FC by MF was correlated significantly with other fecal indicators (TC/FS by MF and FC by MPN), while TC by MPN was not correlated with any other indicators. Thus, the detection of FC by MF-method may be the most reasonable for monitoring the fecal pollution.