The cost-effective protection of membranes is critical to making membrane filtration processes economically advantageous. A technology that could improve both efficacy and cost-efficiency is pre-filtration with automatic self-cleaning microfiber technology. This technology utilizes an automatic self-cleaning microfiber system to filter suspended sediments down to the 3-micron level, replacing commonly used 5- micron cartridges with an automatic microfiber system would thus reduce the sediment load moving downstream to the membranes.