APPLIED VACUUM MEMBRANE DISTILLATION PROCESS TO OPTIMIZE SEAWATER DESALINATION

Abstract

    Reverse Osmosis (RO) is an attractive solution for sea water desalination to supply drinkingwater. Nonetheless, owing to some drawbacks of RO, such as limitation by the osmoticpressure, large volume of brines and low recovery factor, coupling RO and VMD is becomingan interesting solution to further concentrate RO brines and increase the global recovery ofthe process. The idea of this study is then to study the feasibility of VMD for the treatment ofRO brines on long-term experiments. All the tests were carried out with a bench-scale VMDpilot plant and simulations were performed to optimize the operating conditions.

Keyword: Reverse Osmosis (RO), sea water