Water Treatment: Are Membranes the Panacea?

Alongside the rising global water demand, continued stress on current water supplies has sparked interest in using nontraditional source waters for energy, agriculture, industry, and domestic needs. Membrane technologies have emerged as one of the most promising approaches to achieve water security, but implementation of membrane processes for increasingly complex waters remains a challenge. The technical feasibility of membrane processes replacing conventional treatment of alternative water supplies (e.g., wastewater, seawater, and produced water) is considered in the context of typical and emerging water quality goals. This review considers the effectiveness of current technologies (both conventional and membrane based), as well as the potential for recent advancements in membrane research to achieve these water quality goals. We envision the future of water treatment to integrate advanced membranes (e.g., mixed-matrix membranes, block copolymers) into smart treatment trains that achieve several goals, including fit-for-purpose water generation, resource recovery, and energy conservation.

Proposed method for controlling turbid particles in solid-phase bioluminescent toxicity measurement.

In the recent half century, numerous methods have been developed to assess ecological toxicity. However, the presence of solid-particle turbidity sometimes causes such tests to end with questionable results. Many researchers focused on controlling this arbitrary turbidity effect when using the Microtox® solid-phase toxicity system, but there is not yet a standard method. In this study, we examined four solid-phase sample test methods recommended in the Microtox® manual, or proposed from the literature, and compared the existing methods with our proposed method (centrifuged basic solid-phase test, c-BSPT). Four existing methods use the following strategies to control turbid particles: complete separation of liquid and solid using 0.45-µm filtration before contacting solid samples and bacteria, natural settlement, moderate separation of large particles using coarser pore size filtration, and exclusion of light loss in the toxicity calculation caused by turbidity after full disturbance of samples. Our proposed method uses moderate centrifugation to separate out the heavier soil particles from the lighter bacteria after direct contact between them. Among the solid-phase methods tested, in which the bacteria and solid particles were in direct contact (i.e., the three existing methods and the newly proposed one, c-BSPT), no single method could be recommended as optimal for samples over a range of turbidity. Instead, a simple screening strategy for selecting a sample-dependent solid-phase test method was suggested, depending on the turbidity of the solid suspension. The results of this study highlight the importance of considering solid particles, and the necessity for optimal selection of test method to reduce errors in the measurement of solid-phase toxicity.