Better Pretreatment For Seawater Desalination Plants

The primary objective of pretreatment to any RO membrane system is to make the feed water compatible with the membrane. Inadequate membrane pretreatment results in high chemical cleaning costs, increased downtime, and permanent loss of performance with reduced membrane life. This is particularly true in seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) desalination plants with open intakes where water quality parameters fluctuate. When utilizing high efficiency cross-flow microsand technology, the submicron performance yields higher quality water, thus minimizing the requirement for coagulation and flocculation. 

Learning Objectives:

• Review of the desalination industry
• Importance of pretreatment in SWRO applications
• Review of available technologies for pretreatment
• Introduction to CMF (cross-flow microsand filtration) technology
• Red Sea Case Study: Review of the pilot study presented at the IDA conference by Jean Simard of Fortex