Bench-Scale RO Systems for Potable Reuse

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Water is the most important resource for humanity. Yet, abundant and safe drinking water is not available toover 60% of the world's population. The availability of potable water is under threat with growing globalpopulations, over-tapped ground water supplies, the continued contamination of fresh water sources, and thedrought-inducing impacts of climate change. Potable reuse is the process of treating wastewater to the level atwhich it can be safely consumed as drinking water. This process is critical to address global drinking watershortages, specifically in large municipal centers and/or drought-prone regions of the world. Treatment ofwastewater to produce drinking water must be done safely. In order to do this a combination of membranetreatment and UV disinfection has been proposed. Membrane treatment using a process train of microfiltration(MF) and reverse osmosis (RO) membranes removes all the contaminants in wastewater. UV disinfection is thefinal process and it inactivates all bacteria and viruses that may remain in the post-membrane treated water.During the membrane filtration steps the membranes can become fouled by the constituents of wastewater. Toprevent RO membrane fouling during operation anti-scalants and anti-foulants, such as chloramine, areperiodically added to the feed water. These anti-scalants and anti-foulants, however, pass through themembrane and enter the final UV disinfection step. These anti-scalants and anti-foulants scavenge UV lightreducing UV transmittance. The UV disinfection has a decreased effectiveness when the UV transmittance isreduced, thereby necessitating a larger UV AOP system size to account for the potential UV scavenging. Theproposed project investigates new membranes that can reduce the amount of anti-foulants and anti-scalantsrequired, which will maximize the effectiveness of the UV disinfection process. Reducing anti-foulant andanti-scalant use will reduce the overall cost of treating wastewater for potable reuse.