Anaerobic MBR technology for treating municipal wastewater at ambient temperatures

An innovative way to treat municipal wastewater and produce energy at the same time is anaerobic treatment. Anaerobic processes are traditionally used for high-strength wastewater or municipal sludge treatment and only recently have been applied for the treatment of low strength municipal wastewater. To investigate the performance of anaerobic wastewater treatment through the incorporation of membrane technology, a 40 L laboratory scale Anaerobic Membrane Bioreactor (AnMBR) with a flat sheet submerged membrane along with a 40 L reservoir for trapping and measuring the biogas produced have been installed and set in operation. The operation of the AnMBR unit with real wastewater is an important step for data generation, since most of the studies related to AnMBR have been performed with synthetic wastewater offering no insight to problems that a real-world unit might face. This paper presents the start-up of the unit and operating results from the first phase of laboratory scale experiments, conducted at temperatures between 14-18oC. More experiments will be held in the near future at different temperatures and also different operating conditions in order to examine the efficiency of the reactor under realistic conditions, by identifying the possibility of integrating the technology into WWTPs.