About The Event
Biofouling of seawater desalination membranes
High quality drinking water can be produced from seawater with reverse osmosis (RO) membrane filtration processes. As the global demand for fresh clean water is increasing, these membrane technologies are increasingly important.
One of the most serious problems in RO applications is biofouling – excessive growth of biomass – affecting the performance of RO systems. This can be due to the increase in pressure drop across membrane elements, the decrease in membrane permeability or increase in salt passage. These phenomena result in the need to increase the feed pressure to maintain constant water production and to clean the membranes chemically.
The seminar contains (i) an introduction on biofouling, (ii) selected tools to monitor and characterize biofouling, and (iii) new insights derived with these tools, pilot and full-scale RO installation studies, and (iv) new potential biofouling control strategies.
