Abstract
Cellulose triacetate (CTA)-based hollow fiber (HF) membrane is one of the commercially successful semipermeable membranes that has had a long progress since the time the excellent semi-permeable feature of cellulose-based polymers was found in 1957. Because of the reliable and excellent performances, especially for drinking water production from seawater, CTA-HFs have been widely used as reverse osmosis (RO) membranes, especially in arid regions. In this review, recent developments and research trends on CTA-HF membranes for seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) plants were presented. A flux analytical model, an optimization strategy for chlorine injection without losing salt rejection performance, and a module of current high performance CTA RO membranes along with its plant operation data were updated in this paper. Furthermore, a newly developed CTA-HF membrane for brine concentration (BC) application (called BC membrane) was also addressed. Finally, RO/BC hybrid operation was introduced as an effective SWRO desalination technique that enables minimizing the volume of brine disposal from the RO plant by increasing the recovery ratio and the subsequent amount of produced freshwater, without an additional energy input.
Highlights
This review provides the development of a Cellulose triacetate (CTA)-hollow fiber (HF) membrane specialized for brine concentration (BC) applications
In the case of the HF type, only CTA is still used for the reverse osmosis (RO) membrane for seawater desalination, unlike the spiral-wound type, because of its competitive total module performance of CTA-based HF membrane module compared with the PA-based spiral-wound one [29]
The membrane and module, flux theory for the module, and the optimization of plant operation condition are still further developed towards sustainable seawater desalination
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Because of the versatile demands in energy consumption and environmental concerns about brine discharge as mentioned above, CTA-based HFs have caught attention for the usage of different methods, such as forward osmosis (FO) [23,24,25,26], pressure-retarded osmosis (PRO) [11,27,28,29,30,31,32,33] and brine concentration (BC) [34,35] for the emerging technologies Because their applications require optimum characteristics individually, different strategies for designing the membrane and module are required in spite of using the same CTA material. These updates are promising, namely in how they will be useful for developing the CTA-based membrane and module and for contributing to solving the brine management problem for sustainable SWRO desalination in the future
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