Integrated electrocoagulation - Forward osmosis - Membrane distillation for sustainable water recovery from hydraulic fracturing produced water

Forward osmosis (FO) and membrane distillation (MD) are emerging technologies of interest for the treatment of high salinity brines. In this study, we aim to demonstrate the feasibility of an integrated FO-MD system for water recovery from high salinity produced waters obtained from shale gas extraction facilities. In the proposed hybrid system, FO draws water from high salinity feed, while MD regenerates the diluted FO draw solution. We show that this process integration can combine the advantages of both processes; low fouling tendency, possibility of using low-grade waste heat as the main energy source and high quality permeate. We further integrate the FO-MD system with an electrocoagulation (EC) system as pretreatment and show stable performance with minimal fouling. EC removed total organic carbon and total suspended solids by up to 78% and 96%, respectively. We studied the impact of experimental conditions (temperature, flow velocity and draw solution concentration) on performance of the integrated system in short-term experiments. In addition, we conducted long-term experiments using two different produced waters. We show that to achieve continuous high recovery with maximized water flux, a combination of two MD membranes can provide a viable solution.