• Journal of Korean Society of Environmental Engineers
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• v.38 no.5
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• pp.255-268
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• 2016

Climate change has increased the need to secure a new water resource in addition to the traditional water resources such as surface water and ground water. The seawater desalination market is growing sharply in accordance with this situation in Korea, "seawater engineering & architecture of high efficiency reverse osmosis (SEAHERO)" program was launched in 2007 to keep pace with world market trend. SEAHERO program was completed in 2014, contributed to turn the domestic technology in evaporative desalination technology to RO desalination technology. Currently, it is investigated that the average specific energy consumption of the whole RO plant is around $3.5kWh/m^3$. The Busan Gi-jang plant has shown $3.7{\sim}4.0kWh/m^3$, including operational electricity for plant and maintenance building. Although not world top level, domestic RO technology is considered to be able to compete in desalination market. Separately, many researchers in the world are developing new technologies for energy savings. Various processes, forward osmosis (FO), membrane distillation (MD) process are expected to compete with RO in the future market. In Korea, FO-RO hybrid process, MD and pressure retarded osmosis (PRO) process are under development through the research program in Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT). The desalination technology level is expected to decrease to $2.5kWh/m^3$.

• Membrane Journal
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• v.29 no.6
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• pp.314-322
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• 2019

A worsened drought in Chungnam province of Korea due to climate change and increasing water demand at Daesan industrial complex have motivated the 100,000 ㎥/d seawater desalination project. In this study, therefore, the comprehensive analysis of parameters affecting the reverse osmosis (RO) performance was conducted. Under the various conditions of feedwater salinity and temperature in Daesan, energy consumption was calculated as 2.39 ± 0.13 kWh/㎥. The decrease in membrane flux and recovery rate positively impacted annual operation cost. The average total dissolved solids (TDS) of the permeate and energy consumption with highly permeable membrane according to the membrane manufacturer were 3.84 mg/L and 2.22 ± 0.13 kWh/㎥, respectively. In addition, energy saving up to 0.29 kWh/㎥ or cost reduction of membrane module up to 15.6% is expected by changing the RO configuration from full two pass to partial or split partial two pass.