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Modelling, Simulation, Optimisation and Thermodynamic Analysis of Multistage Reverse Osmosis Process based Brackish Water Desalination

The Reverse Osmosis (RO) process has been considered to be one of the most widely utilised techniques for brackish water desalination for its capabilities to produce high-quality water.
The RO process characterised by its low energy consumption compared to thermal
distillation processes, leading to reduced overall water production cost.
To systematically understand the transport phenomena of solvent and solutes via the
membrane texture, several mathematical models were developed. This interestingly aids to conduct a huge amount of simulation and optimisation studies to judge the influence of
control variables on the performance indexes and to adjust the key variables at optimum
values to realise optimum production indexes. In this research, a specific accurate model for
a single spiral wound RO process has been successfully developed and used to build accurate models for the multistage brackish water RO desalination process of two different designs.
The robustness of the model developed was confirmed via validation against the
experimental data collected from simple design of RO system and complicated design of RO system of Arab Potash Company (APC). This is followed by a thorough simulation of the RO process to explore the influence of operating conditions on the process performance indicators. Recently, several contributions were made in this thesis that specifically comprises the improvement of the original design of brackish water RO desalination process.
The influence of a retentate recycle design is investigated on the process performance.
Moreover, evaluation and minimisation of specific energy consumption (expressed in
kWh/m3 of freshwater production) is carried out on the simple and complicated designs of
RO process by implementing an energy recovery device. Also, the most suitable brand of membranes was explored for the RO system from a set of different brands of membrane to
attain the highest-performance rejection at lowest energy consumption compared to the original membrane. Furthermore, a single optimisation framework was developed to mitigate the specific energy consumption of simple and complicated designs of brackish water RO desalination process. Finally, a thermodynamic limitations and exergy analysis of the complicated design of RO system are outlined via a thoroughly study to investigate the locations of high exergy destruction. These contributions were verified as they promoted the separation performance at a significant energy saving. / Mutah University, Jordan

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/19088
Date January 2020
CreatorsAlsarayreh, Alanood A.
ContributorsMujtaba, Iqbal M., Patel, Rajnikant, Al-Obaidi, Mudhar A.A.R.
PublisherUniversity of Bradford, Faculty of Engineering and Informatics
Source SetsBradford Scholars
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis, doctoral, PhD
Rights<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-nd/3.0/88x31.png" /></a><br />The University of Bradford theses are licenced under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/">Creative Commons Licence</a>.

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