During the half century of development from a laboratory discovery to plants capable of producing up to half a million tons of desalinated seawater per day, Reverse Osmosis (RO) technology has undergone rapid transition. This transition process has caused signification transformation and consolidation in membrane chemistry, module design, and RO plant configuration and operation. From the early...

Wastewater produced by the crew members on a long-term space mission needs to be recovered as potable water. Reverse osmosis (RO) has long been in use as a physical membrane separation technology for wastewater treatment. However, membrane fouling and concentration polarization have limited the efficiency for high recovery reverse osmosis systems. An advanced high pressure rotating RO device wa...

Synthetic juice clarification was done through spiral wound ultrafiltration (UF) membrane module. Synthetic juice was clarified at two different operating conditions, such as, with and without permeates recycle at turbulent flow regime. The performance of spiral wound ultrafiltration membrane was analyzed during clarification of synthetic juice. Synthetic juice was the mixture of deionized wate...

A vibrating membrane module currently marketed for ®ltration applications was evaluated for the separation of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from aqueous solutions by pervaporation. Preliminary screening experiments with three VOCs, three silicone membranes, and in the presence and absence of a surfactant were performed to determine if further consideration of the vibrating module for a ®eld...

Multi-objective optimization using genetic algorithm (GA) is carried out for the desalination of brackish and sea water using spiral wound or tubular modules. A few sample optimization problems involving two and three objective functions are solved, both for the operation of an existing plant (which is almost trivial), as well as, for the design of new plants (associated with a higher degree of...

Spacers are used in spiral wound and plate and frame membrane modules to create flow channels between adjacent membrane layers and mix fluid within the flow channel. Flow through the spacer has a significant beneficial impact on mixing and resulting mass transfer rates but is accompanied by an undesirable increase in pressure drop. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is a common tool used to eva...

We propose a simulation study in order to evaluate the effects of concentration polarization damping by splitting a single spiral-wound membrane module in two units connected in series inside the same shell. The reverse osmosis process in each unit is described by the advection-diffusion equation in two dimensions which is solved by a finite difference technique. Several feed regimes and operat...