Pretreatment of Seawater Using Forward Osmosis for Multistage Flash Desalination

Proceedings of The 2nd International Conference on Applied Research in Engineering, Science and Technology

Year: 2019

DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.33422/2nd-icarest.2019.06.285

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Pretreatment of Seawater Using Forward Osmosis for Multistage Flash Desalination

Alaa H. Hawaria ,Mhd. Hafez Ammara, Ahmed T. Yasira ,  Syed Zaidib and Ali Altaeec

 

ABSTRACT: 

Pretreatment of seawater using Forward Osmosis (FO) before a Multistage Flash (MSF) desalination plant could enhance the performance of the thermal desalination process. In this study, brine is used as the draw solution while the feed solution is seawater. The impact of the flow rate of the feed solution and the draw solution on the membrane flux was studied.  In addition, the impact of pretreatment of feed solution by a sand filter on the membrane flux was studied. The pretreatment of the feed solution (i.e. seawater) had minimal impact on the membrane flux. A membrane flux of 14.2 LPM and 13.4 LPM was obtained with non-treated seawater as feed solution and treated seawater as feed solution, respectively. The recovery rate was 26% and 24% for the non-treated seawater and treated seawater, respectively.

Keywords: Forward Osmosis (FO); Multistage flash (MSF); Pretreatment; Membrane flux; Sand filter.