Yes / Clean water demand has significantly increased due to the rise in the global population. However, most water on the Earth has high saline content that cannot be consumed directly; only about one over forty of the total water source is freshwater. Desalinated water is one of the potential solutions to meet the growing demand for freshwater, which is highly energy intensive. This paper analyses the energy, economic and environmental performance of a 5 m3/day PV (photovoltaic) powered reverse osmosis (RO) desalination system. Three scenarios of PV-RO with and without battery storage and diesel generator hybrid systems have been analyzed and investigated for the annual estimate load, net present value, and payback period of the water and electricity production costs. Also, the CO2 avoidance over the lifetime operation of all scearios is evaluated. This study shows that the PV-RO system without battery with 6.3 kW PV panels installed and with a 2-days water storage tank system is the most profitable economically f. For this scenario, the Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE), Levelized Cost of Water (LCOW), and Payback Period (PBP) are found to be $0.154/kWh, $0.627/m3, and five years, respectively. In addition, for this scenario, the CO2 emissions avoidance was the maximum (111,690 kg.CO2eq per year) compared to other scenarios.

Yes / Phenol is one of the most toxic and harmful pollutants in industrial wastewater streams, the removal of which is therefore of critical importance. The use of reverse osmosis (RO) systems as a means of treating wastewater is continuously growing. This research investigates the effect of operating parameters on the performance of five different multistage RO configurations coupled with a trickle bed reactor (TBR) using model-based simulation. The results were compared, and an analysis was then performed to identify which hybrid TBR and multistage RO arrangement rejected the most phenol content. The basis for comparison was four performance metrics of permeate concentration, rejection, recovery, and specific energy. The study found that the flow rate and concentration have little effect on the operation unless there is a concurrent increase of both. It was also found that the four-performance metrics used were interlinked and affect the quality and quantity of the final freshwater product.

Water desalination has the potential to alleviate a significant part of the world’s thirst, with a majority of desalinated water capacity coming from seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO). However, SWRO membrane systems suffer from the loss of performance due to biofouling leading to economic costs. There is no control or preventive strategy for SWRO biofouling and current industry practices recommend chemical treatments to restore membrane performance. Chemical cleaning results in high economic costs due to chemical acquisition, storage, transportation, long plant downtimes and ultimately shorter membrane lifetime and early replacement; in addition to the environmental impact associated with disposing of chemicals. Therefore, there is a need for novel effective green cleaning strategies for SWRO to meet the increasing demand for desalinated water while taking care of the environment. Micronanobubbles (MNBs) consist of small gas cavities formed in aqueous solutions. This study evaluates the efficiency of both air-filled micronanobubbles (AMNBs) and CO2 nucleated MNBs as: i) curative cleaning-in-place (CIP) treatments and ii) preventive daily treatments for biofouling over long-term studies. Experiments were performed using the membrane fouling simulator (MFS) under conditions that are representative of SWRO membrane systems. Pressure drop was implemented as the main biofilm growth monitoring parameter as used by standard industry practices. Curative studies showed that both MNBs CIP treatments had high cleaning efficiencies of 49-56% pressure drop recovery. MNBs pressure drop recovery values were close to the conventional chemical cleaning (NaOH/HCl) at 51% and were significantly higher than the hydraulic flush (HF) physical cleaning control at 24%. The pressure drop recovery results were supported by the optical coherence tomography (OCT) images before and after CIP and biomass autopsy results. Similarly, preventive MNBs daily treatments showed a significant delay in the system’s performance decline. This delay was 5.1 days for the CO2 MNBs experiments, 4 days for the AMNBs, and only 0.6 days for the hydraulic flushing treatments compared to the control. Compared to the control the duration of the operation was doubled in time before the cleaning criteria was met. OCT images confirmed biofilm growth delay with lower biomass occurrence.

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Yes / Reverse Osmosis (RO) process has become one of the most widely utilised technologies for brackish water desalination for its capabilities of producing high-quality water. This paper emphasis on investigating the feasibility of implementing the retentate recycle design on the original design of an industrial medium-sized multistage and multi-pass spiral wound brackish water RO desalination plant (1200 m³/day) of Arab Potash Company (APC) located in Jordan. Specifically, this research explores the impact of recycling the high salinity stream of the 1st pass (at different recycled percentages) to the feed stream on the process performance indicators include, the fresh water salinity, overall recovery rate, and specific energy consumption. The simulation is carried out using an earlier model developed by the same authors for the specified RO plant using gPROMS suits. This confirmed the possibility of increasing the product capacity by around 3% with 100% recycle percentage of the high salinity retentate stream.

Yes / The use of Reverse Osmosis (RO) process in seawater desalination to provide high-quality drinking water is progressively increased compared to thermal technologies. In this paper, multistage spiral wound RO desalination process is considered. Each stage consists of several pressure vessels (PVs) organised in parallel with membrane modules in each PV being organised in series. This allows disconnecting a set of PVs and membrane modules depending on the requirement of cleaning and maintenance. While this flexibility offers the opportunity of generating several RO configurations, we presented only four such configurations of the RO system and analysed them via simulation and optimisation. Production of different grades of water catering different needs of a city is also considered for each of these configurations. The optimisation has resulted in the optimal operating conditions, which maximises the water productivity and minimises the specific energy consumption of the proposed configurations for a given water grade in terms of salinity. For instance, the results indicate that the proposed RO networks can produce drinking water of 500 ppm salinity with a minimum specific energy consumption of 3.755 kWh/m3. The strategy offers the production of different grades of water without plant shutdown while maintaining the membrane modules throughout the year.

High performance engineering materials, poly(arylene ether)s, having very good mechanical properties, excellent oxidative and hydrolytic stability are promising candidates for alternative materials used in the field of Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells (PEMFCs) and Reverse Osmosis (RO) applications. In particular, wholly aromatic sulfonated poly(arylene ether sulfone)s are of considerable interest in the field of PEMFCs and RO, due to their affordability, high Tg, and the ease of sulfonation. Proton exchange membrane fuels cells (PEMFCs) are one of the primary alternate source of energy. A Proton exchange membrane (PEM) is one of the key component in a PEMFC and it needs to have good proton conductivity under partially humidified conditions. One of the strategies to increase proton conductivity under partially RH conditions is to synthesize hydrophobic-hydrophilic multiblock copolymers with high Ion exchange capacity (IEC) values to ensure sufficient ion channel size. In this thesis two multiblock systems were synthesized incorporating trisulfonated hydrophilic oligomers and were characterized in the first two chapters of the thesis. The first multiblock system incorporated a non-fluorinated biphenol-based hydrophobic block. The second study was focused on synthesizing a fluorinated benzonitrile-based hydrophobic block. A fluorinated monomer was incorporated with the aim to improve phase separation which might lead to increased performance under partially humidified conditions. The third study featured synthesis and characterization of a novel hydroquinone-based random copolymer system precursor, which after post-sulfonation, shall form mono-sulfonated polysulfone materials with potential applications in reverse osmosis. The ratio of the amount of hydroquinone incorporated in the copolymer were varied during the synthesis of the precursor to facilitate control over the post-sulfonation process. The simple and low cost process of post-sulfonating the random copolymer enables the precursor to be a promising material to be used in the reverse osmosis application. / Master of Science

The performance of a poly(ether/urea) membrane has been evaluated in a full scale reverse osmosis system. A series of experiments were conducted with six aromatic compounds - anthracene, pyrene, fluorene, 2-chlorobiphenyl, 2,4,6 trichlorophenol, and pentachlorophenol- and four volatile compounds - trichloromethane, bromodichloromethane, dibromochloromethane, and trichloroethene - as single and multi-solute contaminants. The objectives of the experiments were to determine if poly(ether/urea) membranes could produce a permeate that met maximum contaminant levels (MCL) set by the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) and to correlate membrane performance with physical/chemical properties of the solute contaminants. Aromatic contaminants were removed to concentrations below the current MCLs. However, volatile contaminants were not sufficiently rejected by the membrane to meet either the MCL for total trihalomethanes or trichloroethene. Sorption onto the poly(ether/urea) was found to occur for several of the aromatic compounds tested in this research. This prevented developing any relationship between membrane performance and physical/chemical properties of the solute. / Master of Science