Design, Operation, and Control of Stand-alone Hybrid Membrane Osmosis Desalination Systems

Design, Operation, and Control of Stand-alone Hybrid Membrane Osmosis Desalination Systems

Blog Article

Reverse osmosis (RO) is one of the major technologies for seawater desalination, while pressure retarded osmosis (PRO) is a promising technology for power generation.The RO desalination plant has the problems of extensive energy consumption and brine discharge, which can be Side x Side Fridge alleviated by hybridizing the RO process with the PRO process as an integrated RO/PRO system.This study is to pursue a higher goal, that is, the power generated by the PRO unit can provide the energy consumption required for the entire hybrid system.Namely, the hybrid membrane osmosis system can achieve stand-alone operation (without external energy supply) for seawater desalination.In this study, mathematical programming models are developed for the design, operation, and control of the stand-alone hybrid membrane osmosis desalination systems.

First, optimal design for two configurations of the hybrid osmosis system (i.e., RO-PRO and PRO-RO systems) is investigated.The result shows that the PRO-RO system is a more favorable design configuration for stand-alone desalination.Because the membrane system operation is bound to be affected by membrane fouling, this study explores the effects of membrane fouling on the stand-alone operation of the systems, and proposes an open-loop control scheme to determine the optimal operating strategy under membrane fouling.

Finally, a closed-loop control scheme of model predictive control is proposed for the Contours PRO-RO system to instantly compensate for the effects of unknown disturbances and modeling errors on the stand-alone operation of the desalination system.