How to make a black box talk? A review of 50 low-pressure membrane autopsies

This paper looks at the results of autopsying 50 MF/UF modules received from facilities around the world treating water for different applications.The gathered data show that most of the time, the autopsy succeeds in drawing up a cause and effect scenario explaining the observations recorded on sites. The reasons for production loss and integrity failures are enumerated and illustrated. The resulting database allowed benchmarking the ageing of the different polymeric membranes and defining a defect mode and effect analysis in term of membrane ageing.