• Applied Chemistry for Engineering
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.521-526
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• 2006

A membrane bioreactor (MBR) is an effective tool for wastewater treatment with recycling. MBR process has several advantages over conventional activated sludge process (ASP); reliability, compactness, and quality of treated water. The resulting high-quality and disinfected effluents suggest that MBR process can be suitable for the reused and recycling of wastewater. An anoxic/oxic (A/O) type MBR was applied to simultaneous removal of organics and nutrients in sewage. At first, the efficiency of submerged MBR process was investigated using a hollow fiber microfiltration membrane with a constant flux of $10.2L/m^2{\cdot}h$ at each solids retention time (SRT). Results showed that protein/carbohydrate (P/C) ratio increased and total extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) remained constant with SRT increased. Secondly, A/O type MBR with a reverse osmosis (RO) membrane was employed to treat the municipal wastewater. The performance of A/O type MBR-RO process is better for the treatment of organics and nutrients than ASP-MF-RO process in terms of consistent effluents quality.

• Proceedings of the Membrane Society of Korea Conference
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• 1998.06a
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• pp.81-94
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• 1998

Nowadays, membrane separation such as reverse osmosis (RO) and ultrafiltration (UF) play an important role in the industrial separation technology. Among desalination technologies available today, reverse osmosis is usually the most economical process for wide range of water salinity. Main applications include production of high purity water, desalination of seawater and brackish water for a drinking water supply, treatment of waste water for environmental protection, and recovery of precious materials from industrial waste water. In this paper, we will mention membrane performance and these practical use focused on reverse osmosis membranes and ultrafiltration membranes recently developed by Toray.

• Proceedings of the Membrane Society of Korea Conference
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• 1995.06a
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• pp.27-38
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• 1995

Based on innovative membrane module concepts reverse osmosis and nanofiltration are going to become important instruments in environmental engineering. One example is the Disc-Tube-module and its application for the purification of landfill leachate. Currently over 45 different landfills are using this ROCHEM DT-module, in some cases combined with the high pressure reverse osmosis versions of this module, operating at up to 120 bar and 200 bar. This state of the art membrane technology and the DTF-module for nanofiltration, developed by ROCHEM on the basis of the DT-module and RO-systems for the purification of landfill leachate, make possible in hybrid processes permeate recovery rates of more than 97 % with concentration factors up to 40.

• Membrane and Water Treatment
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.15-29
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• 2014

Reverse Osmosis (RO) desalination has gained wide and increasing acceptance around the world as a straightforward undertaking to alleviate the alarming water crisis. An enhanced monitoring of the quality of the water feeding in seawater RO (SWRO) plant through the application of an effective pretreatment option is one of the keys to the success of RO technology in desalination plants. Over the past 10 years, advances in ultrafiltration (UF) membrane technologies in application for water and wastewater treatment have prompted an impetus for using membrane pretreatment in seawater desalination plants. By integrating SWRO plant with UF pretreatment, the rate of membrane fouling can be significantly reduced and thus extend the life of RO membrane. With the growing importance and significant advances attained in UF pretreatment, this review presents an overview of UF pretreatment in SWRO plants. The advantages offered by UF as an alternative of pretreatment option are compared to the existing conventionally used technologies. The current progress made in the integration of SWRO with UF pretreatment is also highlighted. Finally, the recent advances pursued in UF technology is reviewed in order to provide an insight and hence path the way for the future development of this technology.

• Journal of Korean Society of Water and Wastewater
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• v.28 no.6
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• pp.713-723
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• 2014

Biofouling in brackish water reverse osmosis (RO) membranes still needs extensive research to understand cause and mechanism and to obtain methods for reduction of its impact on RO applications. Natural compounds with biofilm formation inhibitory properties are being investigated. Two compounds, vanillin and Epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), were selected due to their great potential on biofilm formation inhibition. Vanillin shows inhibition on quorum sensing mechanisms of biofilm formation. EGCG has potential to inactivate microbial activity. The two compounds were incorporated in typical polyamide reverse osmosis membranes and evaluated on flux behaviours and biofilm formation potential. The surface properties of membrane coated with vanillin were changed tremendously compared to those with EGCG. As a result, the flux was reduced substantially. The biofilm formation seems hindered with EGCG coated membranes compared to the virgin membranes. More research is needed to optimize coating methods applicable to RO membranes and to enhance biofouling reduction.

• Journal of Korean Society of Water and Wastewater
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.89-96
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• 2015

Smart water grid is a water network with communication to save water and energy using various water resources. In smart water grid, water product from the various sources can be blended to be supplied to end-users. The product water blending was reported by literatures while feed water blending has been rarely reported so far. In this work, a commercial reverse osmosis (RO) system design software provided by a membrane manufacturer was used to elucidate the effect of feed water blending on the performance of seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) plant. Fresh water from exisiting water resource was assumed to be blended to seawater to decrease salt concentration of the RO feed water. The feed water blending can simplify the RO system from double to single pass and decrease seawater intake amount, the unit prices of the RO system components including high pressure pump, and operation risk. Due to the increase in RO plant capacity with the feed water blending, however, the RO membrane area and total power consumption increase at higher water blending rates. Therefore, a specific benefit-cost analysis should be carried out to apply the feed water blending to SWRO plants.

• Journal of Korean Society on Water Environment
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• v.28 no.5
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• pp.657-662
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• 2012

This study was carried out to evaluate the removal rate of organic and inorganic matters from landfill leachate using pre-treatment process as coagulation and limonite adsorption, and membrane process as RO (reverse osmosis) and NF(nanofiltration). By adding limonite adsorption as pre-treatment process, about 40% of organic matters in leachate was removed through pre-treatment process and 74.7% of boron was removed after RO process without pH adjustment. The rejection rate of boron in RO process mainly depends on the pH and increased at pH value of 10. RO process was performed as two stage system adjusting pH condtion to 7 and 10 in second RO stage for boron removal. Most (>90%) of TOC, Cl- and inorganic matters as Ca was rejected in first RO stage, the residue was rejected in second RO and the rejection rate was above 97%. Considering economic efficiency of operation cost, NF substituted for the first RO and total removal rate of TOC was above 90%. Through RO system toxicity to Daphnia in leachate was removed completely.

• Proceedings of the Membrane Society of Korea Conference
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• 2003.11a
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• pp.223-225
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• 2003

• Membrane and Water Treatment
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.221-233
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• 2014

Simulations were conducted to predict supersaturation along Reverse Osmosis (RO) modules for seawater desalination. The modeling approach is based on the use of conservation principles and chemical equilibria equations along RO modules. Full Pitzer ion interactive forces model for concentrated solutions was implement to calculate activity coefficients. An average rejection rate for all ionic species was considered. Supersaturation has been used to assess scaling. Supersaturations with respect to all calcium carbonate forms and calcium sulfate were calculated up to 50% recovery rate in seawater RO desalination. The results for four different seawater qualities are shown. The predictions were in a good agreement with the experimental results.

• Membrane and Water Treatment
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.129-136
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• 2018

In this contribution, the control of multivariable reverse osmosis (RO) desalination plant using proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers is presented. First, feed-forward compensators are designed using simplified decoupling method and then the PID controllers are tuned for flux (flow-rate) and conductivity (salinity). The tuning of PID controllers is accomplished by minimization of the integral of squared error (ISE). The ISEs are minimized using a recently proposed algorithm named as teacher-learner-based-optimization (TLBO). TLBO algorithm is used due to being simple and being free from algorithm-specific parameters. A comparative analysis is carried out to prove the supremacy of TLBO algorithm over other state-of-art algorithms like particle swarm optimization (PSO), artificial bee colony (ABC) and differential evolution (DE). The simulation results and comparisons show that the purposed method performs better in terms of performance and can successfully be applied for tuning of PID controllers for RO desalination plants.