International Journal of Environmental Science and Development

Abstract—Biologically treated spentwash from distillery usually contains high chemical oxygen demand (COD), biological oxygen demand (BOD), color, total dissolved solids (TDS) and other contaminants. In India, reverse osmosis (RO) treatment plants have been installed in many of the distilleries at tertiary treatment, but are not properly working due to fouling problem. To make the membrane process proven and reliable technology, proper pre-treatment is mandatory which not only improve quality of RO permeate but also increase life of RO. In the present study, use of micro-filtration (MF) for pre-treatment of RO has been evaluated at the tertiary treatment stage. Experiments were optimized in terms of different operating parameters viz. initial pH (pHo: 2–10), trans-membrane pressure (1-5 bars) and temperature (15- 43°C). Experimental data revealed that the MF could be an effective pre-treatment in removing the pollutants (COD, color and TOC) and improving performance and water recovery (permeate flux) in comparison to RO alone. Removal efficiency for COD, color, TDS and TOC was observed as 31.5%, 42.7% and 27.6% with MF, respectively at optimized conditions with increased permeate flux from 17.5 LPH (RO) to 32 LPH (MF-RO).

Index Terms—Bio-digested distillery spentwash, life cycle assessment, pre-treatment, reverse osmosis, response surface methodology, micro-filtration.

The authors are with the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee 247667, India (e-mail: jangra.pinki@gmail.com, himanshujoshi58@gmail.com).

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Cite: P. Sharma and H. Joshi, "MF as Pretreatment of RO for Tertiary Treatment of Biologically Treated Distillery Spentwash," International Journal of Environmental Science and Development vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 172-176, 2016.