Industrial activities produce a variety of pollutants that may not be easily treated using centralized wastewater treatment systems based on a single treatment unit. The variability of the pollutants brings the importance of industrial-specific integrated wastewater treatment plants such as integrated membrane filtration systems. However, the performance of a membrane filtration process can be highly affected by the presence of high amounts of suspended particles in the raw wastewater. Therefore, proper selection of a pre-treatment unit prior to a membrane filtration wastewater treatment system is a key aspect of its performance. This study investigated the performance of an integrated membrane filtration treatment system connected to an electrochemical process (pre-treatment) on the purification of a poultry slaughterhouse wastewater toward achieving a high-quality effluent. The industrial-scale treatment plant installed at the Izhevsk Production Corporative (PC) poultry farm in Kazakhstan is composed of an electrochemical, ultrafiltration (UF), and reverse osmosis (RO) as the main treatment units. From the analysis results, the electrochemical pre-treatment unit was observed to be highly effective for the removal of some physicochemical parameters such as turbidity, color, total suspended solids, total iron, aluminum, chemical oxygen demand, and biochemical oxygen demand; with removal efficiency ranging from 71 to 85%. The low removal efficiency of the pre-treatment system was also observed from free and total chlorine, nitrites, nitrates, phosphates, and ammonium nitrogen; with removal efficiency ranging from 4 to 45%. While in general, the overall treatment train was observed to be highly efficient for some physicochemical parameters such as turbidity, color, total suspended solids, as well as chemical and biochemical oxygen demand; maintaining almost 100% removal efficiency throughout the study period. Also, the high removal efficiency of the electrochemical pre-treatment processes led to a relatively low rate of cake formation on the membrane filters.
Keywords: cake formation; electrolysis; membrane filtration; poultry wastewater treatment; water quality.