On-line monitoring of membrane fouling based on an improved electrical measurement method

On-line monitoring of membrane fouling is essential in the water treatment process. Drawbacks such as low-sensitivity and off-line limitations limit the application of existing methods. An on-line monitoring method based on Electrical Resistance Tomography (ERT) sensors is put forward in this paper. The Particle Swarm Optimization with Simulated Annealing (PSO-SA) algorithm is used in optimizing the topologies of finite element models in order to decrease the ill-posedness of sensitivity matrices. The deep denoising extreme learning machine with an auto-encoder model and the K-singular value decomposition algorithm are used in ERT reconstruction to improve imaging quality. The lift-wavelet is adopted in measuring the permeate flux to improve measuring accuracy. The ERT pixel values of the membrane module and the result of flux are used to analyze the fouling status. The results of membrane fouling experiments demonstrate the following: (1) Based on the local ERT pixels, the “two stage” phenomenon of membrane fouling can be observed. (2) In the early stage, the fouling distribution of the localized membrane module is consistent with its ERT pixels. (3) The deposition process of foulants for the localized membrane module is synchronized with the variation of ERT pixels. (4) The integrity of the membrane module can be detected according to the ERT pixels. Therefore, the novel method can effectively reflect the membrane fouling process, especially in the early stages of membrane fouling.