Integrated system of anoxic / activated sludge and ultrafiltration membrane for zero liquid discharge of pharmaceutical industrial wastewater treatment

The integrated system of anoxic / activated sludge and ultrafiltration membrane was developed to design an efficient outdoor membrane bioreactor system for zero liquid discharge (ZLD) for pharmaceutical wastewater treatment. The integrated system composes of an anoxic/ aerobic activated sludge process in batch mode fol-lowed by an ultrafiltration membrane (UF). The membrane was prepared using blend polymer techniques. The membrane performance was investigated on Acetylsalicylic acid (ASA) drug removal from wastewater. The re-sults of the batch single-stage, acclimatized activated sludge process (BSASP), indicate that the removal effi-ciency of the ASA drug was 79.3% at pH 6-7 and F/M of 0.85 at HRT of 10 h. While using two stages anoxic aerobic activated sludge process (TSOx /Ar ASP) was able to remove more than 90% at the optimum investigated parameters. However, using a prepared membrane provides a good permeate flux of 152.8 L/m2 h and ASA removal percentage of 96.8% for the concentration of 300 ppm. Moreover, long-term experiment using the in-tegrated system produces treated water with high quality, where the ASA drug removal reached 99.7% using the overall process.