Pretreatment of water prior to filtration, usually using
conventional drinking water treatment processes, has been
proposed as a means to control membrane fouling. Coagulation
was found to be effective in reducing membrane fouling
(Chen et al., 2007; Citulski et al., 2008; Song et al., 2008) in that
NOM could be substantially adsorbed to flocs of hydrolyzed
coagulants that are highly filterable. Coagulation in combination
with sedimentation was more effective than coagulation
alone in reducing membrane fouling (Liang et al., 2008),
because the pretreatment could effectively remove both
NOM and inorganic particles from the water (Liu et al., 2011).
Sand filtration was added following coagulation to control