Fouling control and modeling in reverse osmosis for seawater desalination: A review

The development of the antifouling Reverse Osmosis (RO) membranes requires modeling and simulation as an essential tool alongside the progress of RO membrane technologies. After discussing the most re-cent knowledge on fouling, cleaning procedures, and pretreatment technologies, this review highlights the recent advances in RO membranes technology, together with macroscale and microscale modeling that could lead the full development of antifouling RO membrane. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) emerges as a promising modeling tool that could fully capture all mechanisms/phenomena involved in RO and fouling. For the successful simulation of fouling coupled to RO process, the development of mod -els achieving a trade-off between computational cost and accuracy requirements that can be applied to all fouling types requires further theoretical development in the future.(c) 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

The development of antifouling Reverse Osmosis (RO) membranes requires modeling and simulation tools to study fouling, cleaning procedures, and pretreatment technologies. This review focuses on recent advances in RO membrane technology and highlights the potential of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) as a promising modeling tool for capturing all mechanisms and phenomena associated with RO and fouling.