Energy consumption of water recovery from wastewater in a submerged forward osmosis system using commercial liquid fertilizer as a draw solute

Abstract

Abstract Using liquid fertilizer as a draw solute in forward osmosis (FO) to extract high-quality water from wastewater is of strong interest because it eliminates the need for regenerating draw solute, thereby requiring less energy input to system operation. However, energy consumption of such an approach has not been evaluated before. Herein, a submerged FO system with all-purpose liquid fertilizer as a draw solute was studied for energy consumption of water recovery from either deionized (DI) water or domestic wastewater. The results showed that a higher draw concentration led to higher water flux and lower energy consumption, for example 0.25 ± 0.08 kW h m−3 with 100% draw concentration, but reverse salt flux (RSF) was also more serious. Decreasing the recirculation flow rate from 100 to 25 mL min−1 had a minor effect on water flux, but significantly reduced energy consumption from 1.30 ± 0.28 to 0.09 ± 0.02 kW h m−3. When extracting water from the secondary effluent, the FO system exhibited comparable performance of water flux and energy consumption to that of the DI water. However, the primary effluent resulted in obvious fouling of the FO membrane and higher energy consumption than that of the secondary effluent/DI water. This study has provided important implications to proper evaluation of energy consumption by the FO system using liquid fertilizer or other non-regenerating draw solutes.