Abstract
Reverse osmosis (RO) is the most widely used technology for seawater desalination purposes. The long-term operating data of full-scale plants is key to analyse their performance under real conditions. The studied seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) desalination plant had a production capacity of 5000 m3/d for irrigation purposes. The operating data such as conductivities flows, and pressures were collected for around 27,000 h for 4 years. The plant had sand and cartridge filters without chemical dosing in the pre-treatment stage, a RO system with one stage, 56 pressure vessels, seven RO membrane elements per pressure vessel and a Pelton turbine as energy recovery device. The operating data allowed to calculate the average water and salt permeability coefficients (A and B) of the membrane as well as the specific energy consumption (SEC) along the operating period. The calculation of the average A in long-term operation allowed to fit the parameters of three different models used to predict the mentioned parameter. The results showed a 30% decrease of A, parameter B increase around 70%. The SEC was between 3.75 and 4.25 kWh/m3. The three models fitted quite well to the experimental data with standard deviations between 0.0011 and 0.0015.
Highlights
Desalination is the industrial process to remove salt from seawater or brackish water, obtaining desalinated water. 97.5% of the water that exists on our planet is salt water, 2.5%is fresh water and less than 1% of the latter is suitable for human consumption
Greater energy consumption is required in seawater desalination plants compared to of brackish water, for this reason the present study focuses on achieving energy consumption improvements in seawater desalination plants
Greater energy consumption Feed is required in seawater desalination plants compared to Seawater brackish water, and for this reason the present study focuses on achieving energy imSalt rejection provements in seawater desalination plants
Summary
Desalination is the industrial process to remove salt from seawater or brackish water, obtaining desalinated water. 97.5% of the water that exists on our planet is salt water, 2.5%. Following the state of the art in water desalination and the evolution of this process, for a Canary regional level and for a national and international level, there are different desalination procedures like multi-effect distillation (MSF), vapor compression (VC), multi-stage distillation (MED) and reverse osmosis (RO), which currently accounts for 65% of the total in the world [9,10,11,12,13,14,15] The objective of this investigation is obtain improvements at desalination plants, based on the reduction of energy consumption in the production of fresh water. BY following this long-term operating data, it was possible to study an RO desalination plant and to maintain the performance of the plant during four years without membrane replacement or chemical cleaning steps
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