Forward osmosis (FO) can be used to extract clean water and pre-concentrate municipal wastewater to make it amenable to anaerobic treatment. A protocol was developed to assess the suitability of FO draw solutes for pre-concentrating wastewater for potential integration with anaerobic treatment to facilitate resource recovery from wastewater. Draw solutes were evaluated in terms of their ability...

Forward osmosis (FO) as emerging technology for water treatment was reported to exhibit higher solute rejections compared reverse (RO). In this work, the rejection of two uncharged organic compounds (nicotinamide, caffeine) were investigated first time in low-pressure (LPRO) mode and FO under similar process conditions utilizing same hollow fiber forward membrane modules. consistently showed th...

Seawater desalination, the desalination of waters flowing back from hydraulic fracturing processes and brackish water desalination constitute important desalination applications. These have a combined market size in excess of $25 billion per annum and a combined water production rate equivalent to the domestic consumption of over 300 million people. Each application offers its own distinct chal...

Organic matter leads to one of the biggest problems in membranes: fouling. Developing efficient cleaning processes is therefore crucial. This study systematically examines how alginic acid fouling formed under different physical and chemical conditions affect osmotic backwashing cleaning efficiency in forward osmosis (FO). The fouling layer thickness before and after osmotic backwashing was mea...

A hybrid ultrafiltration-osmotic membrane bioreactor (UFO-MBR) was investigated for over 35 days for nutrient and trace organic chemical (TOrC) removal from municipal wastewater. The UFO-MBR system uses both ultrafiltration (UF) and forward osmosis (FO) membranes in parallel to simultaneously extract clean water from an activated sludge reactor for nonpotable (or environmental discharge) and po...

Fertiliser-drawn forward osmosis (FDFO) desalination has been recently studied as one feasible application of forward osmosis (FO) for irrigation. In this study, the potential of membrane scaling in the FDFO process has been investigated during the desalination of brackish groundwater (BGW). While most fertilisers containing monovalent ions did not result in any scaling when used as an FO draw ...

Reverse osmosis (RO) has been widely applied in various water and wastewater treatment processes as a promising membrane technology. However, RO membrane fouling is a global issue, which limits it operating flux, decreases water production, increases power consumption and requires periodical membranes Cleaning-in-Place (CIP) procedure. This may result in low effectiveness, high cost and adds en...

Polyepoxysuccinic acid (PESA) is a green corrosion scale inhibitor. When PESA is used for wastewater desalination in the forward osmosis (FO) process, the diluted PESA solution could be used for cooling systems. In our investigation, the effects of membrane orientation, temperature and flow rate on FO performance are studied using PESA as a draw solute. The results show that the effect of tempe...