Membrane fouling during water or wastewater treatments: Current research updated

Membrane fouling is the single most influential factor that limits the membrane process performance in long-term operation. This mini-review reviewed the currently available review papers on membrane fouling studies and summarized the research trends from the conclusions highlighted by these reviews. On foulant aspect, the origin of novel foulants and the biofoulants are widely studied. On characterization and control strategy aspect, novel characterization tools and low-fouling membranes are to be proposed and tested, and the conventional and novel control strategies are under development. On mechanism part, the use of extended blocking models and the extended interfacial interaction models on interpreting fouling behavior is a research focus.