Calcium carbonate precoating/acid cleaning method for fouling control in ceramic nanofiltration membranes

• Calcium carbonate precoat for ceramic nanofiltration membrane. • The smaller Precoat particle size, the better permeability recovered. • Citric acid cleaning performed best. • Six fouling/cleaning cycles with one application of the precoat layer were achieved. Ceramic nanofiltration is a potential one-step treatment for industrial waste streams. It can remove colloidal particles, oil droplets and some organic molecules. The drawback of the technology is that backwash cannot be applied to remove the accumulated cake layer from the membrane surface. At the moment only chemical cleaning with aggressive oxidizing agents like chlorine are effective to restore the permeability of the membranes after fouling. However, calcium carbonate (CaCO 3 ) precoating has shown potential benefits in preliminary research, but have only been executed at laboratory scale, under a constant pressure and with a limited number of experimental cycles. In the presented work, the CaCO 3 precoat/acid cleaning method was comprehensively studied under varying operational conditions. Dead-end filtration of a CaCO 3 -dispersion was used to precoat the membrane surface. Three different acids were tested to partly dissolve the precoat and remove the cake layer from the membrane surface. It was found that citric acid performed the best to recover the permeability of the membrane, probably due to the chelating properties, capturing the calcium ions, with a good removal of the cake layer during forward flush as a result. The size of precoat particles influenced the efficacy of permeability recovery. The smaller the deposited precoating particles on the membrane surface were, the better the cleaning effect was. It is expected that, when filtering real sewage water, these membranes can operate with one precoat during about 25 days with five consecutive citric acid cleaning cycles before a chlorine-based chemical treatment should thoroughly clean the membrane module.