Study on the performance of O₃-PAC-ceramic membrane coupling technology for phenol wastewater treatment

Ozone-powdered activated carbon (O₃-PAC) wastewater treatment technology has good development potential, but the inability to effectively separate wastewater from PAC has become the technology bottleneck. A coupled O₃-PAC-ceramic membrane technology system was constructed with phenol as the target pollutant. The technology was investigated in terms of the performance of COD removal and membrane separation of PAC by reaction kinetics, the tandem resistance model and the Hermans-Bredee model, respectively. The results showed that O₃-PAC was able to achieve 100% COD removal within 40 min, and the reaction rate was 2.5 times that of O₃-GAC. PAC and wastewater were separated by the ceramic membrane, and when the operating pressure exceeded 0.06 MPa, the reversible contamination was converted to irreversible contamination. Membrane contamination was a process of conversion from complete blockage to filter cake blockage, and increasing the wastewater flow rate on the membrane surface could destroy the formation of the filter cake layer. After six consecutive cycles of the experiment, COD removal rate of the simulated wastewater at 40 min remained above 95%, but the irreversible contamination of the ceramic membrane tended to increase.