Abstract
Membrane technology has gained much ground in water and wastewater treatment over the past couple of decades. This is timely, as the world explores smart, eco-friendly, and cheap water and wastewater treatment technologies in its quest to make potable water and sanitation commonplace in all parts of the world. Against this background, this study investigated forward osmosis (FO) in the removal of salts (chlorides, sulphates, and carbonates) and organics (chemical oxygen demand (COD), turbidity, total suspended solids (TSS), and color) from a synthetic municipal wastewater (MWW), mimicking secondary-treated industrial wastewater, at very low feed and draw solution flow rates (0.16 and 0.14 L/min respectively), using 70 g/L NaCl solution as the draw solution. The results obtained showed an average of 97.67% rejection of SO42− and CO32− while Cl− was found to enrich the feed solution (FS). An average removal of 88.92% was achieved for the organics. A permeation flux of 5.06 L/m2.h was obtained. The kinetics of the ions transport was studied, and was found to fit the second-order kinetic model, with Pearson’s R-values of 0.998 and 0.974 for Cl− and CO32− respectively. The study proves FO as a potential technology to desalinate saline MWW.
Highlights
Municipalities transport and treat large volumes of wastewater daily
This study looked at the removal and feed concentration kinetics of chlorides, sulphates, and carbonates from municipal wastewater using 70 g/L NaCl as the draw solution at very low feed solution (FS) and DS flow rates (0.16 and 0.14 L/m, respectively)
In this study, simulated municipal wastewater (MWW), mimicking effluent from industrial processes was desalinated using forward osmosis
Summary
Municipalities transport and treat large volumes of wastewater daily. It is reported that about 380 billion cubic meters of wastewater is produced annually worldwide [1]. Most MWW treatment facilities employ sand and membrane filtration, chlorination and UV disinfection with the aim of removing turbidity, pathogens, and nutrients [3] These processes, do not remove dissolved salts from the wastewater streams and these end up in the environment causing devastating effects on the aquatic system, agricultural lands, surface and ground water, and downstream water treatment facilities [9,10]. Thermal desalination techniques like multistage flash (MSF) evaporation, and membrane processes like reverse osmosis (RO), nano filtration (NF) and electrodialysis are employed for reclamation of water through desalination [17]. These processes, are energy intensive, making reclaimed water expensive. Reduction in volume of gas field produced water Coal mine wastewater desalination Sewage (primary effluent)
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