Wastewater contaminated by heavy metals can cause lasting threaten to the ecosystem and human health because of non-degradability and bioaccumulation.Several conventional methods have been applied for the removal of heavy metals such as chemical precipitation,ion-exchange,activated carbon adsorption and membrane separation.However,most of these methods have some limitations in industrial applications,such as high capital and operating costs,incomplete metal ion removal and secondary pollution especially in treating high volumes of wastewater with dilute metal concentration.Biosorption is an alternative method to remove heavy metals from dilute aqueous solutions and offers significant advantages such as low cost,mild operating conditions and abundant biomaterial resources such as industrial biomass types and seaweed.In this present paper,coupling biosorption and membrane separation,the waste biomass of Penicillium chysogenum which is abundant in China from fermentation industry was adopted to prepare a novel low cost membrane-type biosorbent.Through the above process,the solid pollution caused by the industrial waste mycelium can be eliminated and the waste biomass will be used as a renewable resource for removal heavy metals.The characterization shows that the biosorbent has a heterogeneous and rough surface with porous structure,its surface functional groups such as –C=O,-NH2 and –OH are involved in Cu(Ⅱ) adsorption.A wastewater treatment system with a plate column reactor was set up,and the biosorbent membrane was piled into the reactor layer by layer.The Cu(Ⅱ) removal process was optimized via response surface methodology (RSM) based on Box-Behnken model.A statistically second-order polynomial model was constructed with a R2 value of 0.9529,on the basis of which the three-dimensional response surfaces were plotted.The optimum levels of each variable when the maximum response was obtained via first-order partial differential algorithm.And the established significant quadratic regression model fitted the experimental data well with the error not more than 1.22%.The prepared membrane-type biosorbent of Penicillium biomass showed good mechanical properties and could be used successfully for 10 biosorption-desorption-regeneration cycles without obvious loss of its adsorption ability,which shows a relatively higher Cu(Ⅱ) uptake ability and has an obvious advantage for reuse compared with some other low-cost biosorbents reported in the literatures.The membrane-type biosorbent is favorable in multiple cycles and is a promising biosorbent for further industrial applications in the heavy metals wastewater treatment.