Abstract
Precipitation of calcium phosphate scale on reverse osmosis (RO) membranes continues to be a major challenge for wastewater recycling facilities. In most cases, antiscalant is dosed in combination with sulfuric acid because calcium phosphate solubility improves at lower pH. Several waste water RO plants in California that have attempted to reduce the costly acid dosing have experienced fast scale formation that has offset any savings with downtime and expensive cleaning chemicals. Online cleanings were attempted by reducing the pH to 6 for 1 week in order to reduce downtime; however, they did not fully restore flux in the tail elements and performance progressively declined over time. When these membranes were autopsied, silica was surprisingly the predominant deposit on the membrane surface, even though brine silica concentrations were only in the range of 130–160 ppm. An extensive study was conducted to simulate these conditions in a laboratory setting. Tests were conducted using various antiscalants av...
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