A case study of industrial MBR process for poultry slaughterhouse wastewater treatment

Abstract

The wastewater discharged from the poultry slaughterhouse always contains high levels of chemical oxygen demand (COD) and biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) and thus, it requires proper treatment to minimize its negative impacts on the receiving water bodies. In this work, we presented a local case study of the full-scale implementation of membrane bioreactor (MBR) process with capacity of 144 m3/day to treat the poultry slaughterhouse wastewater. Over the 6-month monitoring period, our results showed that the permeate flow rate of the MBR process was relatively stable and only suffered from approximately 16% flux decline for the entire period with 8-h operation daily. Such flux deterioration is acceptable given the membrane was not subjected to any cleaning process. With respect to the separation efficiencies, the MBR process showed a very promising performance by meeting almost all of the parameters' limit of the National Water Quality Standards (Class IIB Limit), except for the dissolved oxygen (DO) that displayed slightly higher value than the maximum limit. A chemical cleaning process using sodium hydrochloride as agent was found to be effective to retrieve the permeate flow rate of the fouled membrane by 99%, indicating the deposited organic foulants were mainly reversible ones. The findings from this case study clearly demonstrated the potential of MBR process for treatment of poultry slaughterhouse wastewater and played an important role to minimize the negative impacts of discharged effluents on the environment.