Performance evaluation of a medium-scale industrial reverse osmosis brackish water desalination plant with different brands of membranes. A simulation study

Brackish water can be considered an important source of fresh water, via desalination, especially for arid districts. Reverse Osmosis (RO) process has been successfully used to produce fresh water from brackish water sources. However, there is still the challenge of improving the performance of multistage RO desalination plants. From the selection of the RO configurations to the selection of the appropriate type of membranes and the operating conditions at the end determines the performance of RO process in terms of recovery, salt rejection, energy consumptions and ultimately the cost of production of freshwater. Using model-based simulation, this work attempts to investigate the most suitable types of membranes for an industrial scale RO plant from a set of different membrane brands that would attain the highest-performance at lowest specific energy consumption (SEC). As a case study, we considered a multistage multi-pass medium-scale RO plant (1200 m(3)/day) of Arab Potash Company (APC, Jordan) which produces high quality water for the boilers after pre-treatment stage. The simulation results confirmed that employment of the Filmtec BW30LE-440 would increase water recovery by about 22% besides reducing the product salinity and SEC by about 15% and 10%, respectively compared to the existing membrane.

Automated summary

This study aims to improve the performance of multistage RO desalination plants by selecting suitable membranes and operating conditions for efficient freshwater production. Through model-based simulation, it was found that employing the Filmtec BW30LE-440 membrane could significantly increase water recovery by about 22%, reduce product salinity by 15%, and lower specific energy consumption by 10% compared to the existing membrane.