EXPERIMENTAL AND NUMERICAL OPTIMIZATION OF REVERSE OSMOSIS DESALINATION PLANT

Abstract

The objective of the present work is to investigate theoretically and experimentally, the optimization of the RO desalination system leading to maximum performance. The experimental work is carried out to measure and study the influence of the main design and operating parameters on the RO system in both laboratory and commercial plants. In the theoretical work, the most popular system governing equations are chosen to be employed in the Genetic Algorithm method to approach the system optimization.

A prototype RO system experimental setup is designed and constructed in the Thermal Engineering Laboratory, Faculty of Engineering, Mansoura University. The setup consists mainly of water tank, feed water pump, activated carbon filter, cartridge filter, high pressure water pump, RO membrane element ass mbled unit, piping and control valves. A series of experimental runs have been carried out to investigate the influence of the major parameters on the RO desalination system performance; namely the feed water temperature, pressure, salinity and the pH value: In the experiments, the used feed is brackish water obtained from number of wells at different conditions of TDS and pH. The setup is suitably instrumented to measure the temperature, pressure, salinity and pH values at different points in the system.

Results have shown that increasing the feed water temperature increases the permeate flow rate and decreases brine flow rate. Also, it decreases the pH for