Fouled and Back Again: A Membrane’s Tale

The City of Mansfield, Texas owns and operates the Bud Ervin Water Treatment Plant (WTP). The facility includes both a conventional treatment train and a membrane filtration train consisting of a hollow-fiber, low-pressure membrane system that has been in operation since the spring of 2011. After about 12 months of operation, the City began to experience fiber breaks in the membrane filtration system. The City evaluated the cause of the problem and developed a solution to reduce the occurrence of these fiber breaks. The paper discusses the methods that were used to detect which modules were plugged, the cleaning options for the affected modules, and monitoring procedures to prevent another wide-spread reoccurrence of the plugging event.

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