Title: Influence of feed quality on seawater reverse osmosis performance

Authors: Saly T. Panicker, S. Prabhakar, P.K. Tewari

Addresses: Desalination Division, BARC, Mumbai 400085, India. ' Desalination Division, BARC, Mumbai 400085, India. ' Desalination Division, BARC, Mumbai 400085, India

Abstract: The trouble-free operation of a Reverse Osmosis (RO) plant relies on the quality of the treated feed water, which highlights the need for optimisation of the pre-treatment steps. The quality of raw seawater varies with time in terms of suspended and colloidal load, along with the dissolved salt content. In a conventional pre-treatment scheme, consisting of clarification and particulate and micron filtrations, along with chemical conditioning, the chemical dose rates are required to be pre-determined and monitored according to the changing raw water quality. In the RO section, operating pressure and membrane area should be variables as the need arises, depending on the variation in dissolved salts, for maximum production of better quality water. In this paper, the theoretical evaluation of RO performance with respect to seasonal variation in feed salinity is presented, which tells of the need to incorporate sufficient flexibility in operation when designing a plant.

Keywords: feed quality; seawater reverse osmosis; RO; reverse osmosis design; reverse osmosis operation; pretreatment; water quality; feed salinity.

DOI: 10.1504/IJND.2006.012520

International Journal of Nuclear Desalination, 2006 Vol.2 No.2, pp.166 - 171

Published online: 20 Feb 2007 *

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