In recent years, clean water is essential to human health and is a critical feedstock in a variety of key industries. The world is facing formidable challenges in meeting rising demands of clean water as the available supplies of freshwater are decreasing due to extended droughts, population growth, more stringent health based regulations, the climate change, and competing demands. Therefore, there is a great need for effective and advanced wastewater treatment techniques.

The wastewater treatment process is a bit complicated because wastewater contains a variety of constituents such as particles, organic materials, and emulsion depending on the resource. Micellar Enhanced Ultrafiltration (MEUF) technology will play a key role in solving this water crisis by introducing an effective and cheap wastewater treatment technique. The MEUF process is one of the promising alternative technologies for removal of heavy metal ions and the low-molecular-weight substance from the wastewater. In such a process, a surfactant is added into the aqueous stream containing organic matters. When the surfactant concentration rises above the critical micellar concentration (CMC), surfactant monomers assemble and aggregate to form micelles. These macromolecular structures can solubilize organic matter into their hydrophobic core or adsorb on its surface. The aqueous stream is then filtered by an appropriate ultrafiltration membrane with pore sizes smaller than the micelle size. The micelles along with the solubilized organic matter are then rejected into the retentate stream.