Membrane-based valorization of sludge digestates: linking pretreatment effects to separation performance

Anar, Imamverdiyev and Zoltán, Péter Jákói and Cecilia, Hodúr and Beszédes, Sándor (2026) Membrane-based valorization of sludge digestates: linking pretreatment effects to separation performance. In: Proceedings of the 32nd International Symposium on Analytical and Environmental Problems. Szegedi Tudományegyetem (University of Szeged), Szeged, pp. 548-552. ISBN 9789636881757

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Abstract

Anaerobic digestion residues are increasingly treated as secondary resources for water, nutrient and energy recovery rather than as wastes for disposal, a shift reinforced in the European Union by the recast Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive. Membrane processes are leading candidates for fractionating the liquid fraction of digestate, but their stability depends on feed properties that upstream pretreatment strongly modifies. This contribution summarizes a recently published review [1] that treats pretreatment and membrane separation as one conditioning-to-separation pathway. Evidence on thermal hydrolysis, microwave, alkaline, ozone and enzymatic conditioning is linked to the behavior of pressure-driven membranes (MF, UF, NF, RO), electrodialysis and bipolar membrane electrodialysis (ED, BMED) and membrane distillation (MD). Pretreatments that raise solubilization and improve bulk rheology can also increase the load of soluble biopolymers and fine colloids: microwave treatment of activated sludge at 80 °C, for example, lowered the median particle size from 228 to 45 µm while the sludge filter resistance increased about twentyfold. The reported indicators show that ammonium is the most consistently recoverable or removable target, that a staged UF selective ED RO train raised clean-water recovery from about 38% to 88% at pilot scale, and that digestate-specific energy data exist mainly for electro-driven processes. Condition-explicit reporting and long-term operation on real digestate are identified as the main prerequisites for scale-up.

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