• Proceedings of the Membrane Society of Korea Conference
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• 1996.09a
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• pp.121-145
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• 1996

Due to more stringent regulations in drinking water, membrane separation has been playing an increasingly important role. Seawater desalination by reverse osmosis is a typical example and has been used world-wide. Although the existing technology based on coagulation and media filtration is well established and reliable technology, with the advance of industrial and agricultural activities it is difficult for this technology to remove contaminants such as nitrate and synthetic organic chemicals. To meet the drinking water standards and produce higher quality water, several membrane filtration research programs have been initiated which include Japanese MAC21 and New MAC21 projects. In this paper, potable water application of reverse osmosis (RO) and nanofiltration(NF) and their case histories will be explained in more detail.

• Membrane Journal
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.55-61
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• 2016

Organic fouling observed in submerged membrane filtration as a pretreatment for seawater desalination increases energy consumption for membrane operation because of requiring frequent chemical cleaning and membrane replacement. In membrane pretreatment for seawater facing with algae blooms, membrane fouling was observed in submerged microfiltration using sodium alginate model compound which is one of the main components of extracellular polymeric substances. Without aeration, aglinate fouling increased with its concentration while aeration reduced the alginate fouling effectively regardless of its concentration tested. In the absence of aeration, alingate fouling tended to be decreased with increasing calcium concentration. However, this effectiveness was reduced by increasing sodium chloride concentration. At high concentration of sodium chloride and calcium similar to the seawater conditions, aeration reduced initial fouling. However, as time progressed, the effect of increased airflow rate on fouling reduction was not significant, implying that optimum airflow rate to control alginate fouling in submerged microfiltration can exist.

• Membrane and Water Treatment
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• v.8 no.5
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• pp.449-462
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• 2017

Direct treatment of municipal wastewater by forward osmosis (FO) process was evaluated in terms of water flux decline, reverse salt diffusion, pollutants rejection and concentration efficiency by using synthetic seawater as the draw solution. It was found that when operating in PRO mode (active layer facing the draw solution), although the FO membrane exhibited higher osmotic water flux, more severe flux decline and reverse salt diffusion was also observed due to the more severe fouling of pollutants in the membrane support layer and accompanied fouling enhanced concentration polarization. In addition, although the water flux decline was shown to be lower for the FO mode (active layer facing the feed solution), irreversible membrane fouling was identified in both PRO and FO modes as the water flux cannot be restored to the initial value by physical flushing, highlighting the necessity of chemical cleaning in long-term operation. During the 7 cycles of filtration conducted in the experiments, the FO membrane exhibited considerably high rejection for TOC, COD, TP and $NH_4{^+}-N$ present in the wastewater. By optimizing the volume ratio of seawater draw solution/wastewater feed solution, a concentration factor of 3.1 and 3.7 was obtained for the FO and PRO modes, respectively. The results demonstrated the validity of the FO process for direct treatment of municipal wastewater by using seawater as the draw solution, while facilitating the subsequent utilization of concentrated wastewater for bioenergy production, which may have special implications for the coastline areas.

• Journal of Korean Society of Environmental Engineers
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• v.39 no.9
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• pp.542-547
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• 2017

This paper was to analyze the membrane characterization of hydrophilicity, surface morphology and membrane chemical anlysis of three commercial microfiltration/ultrafiltration membranes, and evaluate the filtration performance of a seawater to assess the availability for pretreatment of desalination process. From the results of contact angle, Mem-3, fabricated with polyacrylonitrile, was highly hydrophilic. It find out that Mem-3 has more anti-biofouling property. In Field emission scanning electron microscope (FESEM), Mem-1 (polyethylene) and Mem-2 (Polyvinylidenefluoride) showed the sponge-like shape and Mem-3 showed finger-like shape. Membrane chemical analysis by energy dispersive spectrometer (EDS) presented that Mem-2 was mostly fluoride and Mem-3 had s high ratio of N (32.47%) due to the nitrile group. The permeation flowrate per time on suction pressures using deionized water (D.I. water) tends that permeation rate of Mem-3 more increased when the pressure was increased compared to other membranes. From the results of turbidity and total suspended solids (TSS) removal, turbidity of permeate was 0.191 NTU to 0.406 NTU and TSS was 2.2 mg/L to 3.0 mg/L in all membranes, indicating that it was not suitable for the pretreatment of seawater desalination by short-term experiments.

• Journal of Korean Society of Environmental Engineers
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• v.36 no.7
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• pp.492-497
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• 2014

This study investigated removal characteristics of organic matters in pretreatment and reverse osmosis (RO) membrane processes for seawater desalination. Also, the influence of the changes in characteristics of organic matters on the membrane fouling was assessed. The pretreatment processes included dual media filtration (DMF), pressurized membrane filtration (MF), and submerged membrane filtration (SMF). Turbidity, UV absorption at 254 nm, dissolved organic carbon, size exclusion chromatography (SEC), fluorescence excitation emission matrix (FEEM), and transparent exopolymer particles (TEP) in raw and processed waters were analyzed. Ions and minerals were not removed by any pretreatment process tested, but were removed over 99% through the RO membrane process. Hydrophobic organics, which can play major role in organic membrane fouling, were relatively readily removed compared with hydrophilic ones. Membrane based pretreatment such as MF and SMF exhibited better removals of organics than conventional DMF. As the levels of organics in pretreated water decreased, the silt density index (SDI) decreased. MF treated water exhibited the lowest SDI value; this is possibly due to the lowest TEP ($0.1-0.4{\mu}m$) concentrations.

• Journal of Korean Society on Water Environment
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• v.33 no.4
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• pp.403-408
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• 2017

In these days, wastewater reclamation and seawater desalination play essential role in addressing the challenge of worldwide water scarcity. Particularly, reverse osmosis (RO) for seawater desalination process is commonly used due to less energy consumption than conventional thermodynamic systems. However, membrane fouling and electrical energy consumption during operation of RO system for seawater desalination haver continued to be a obstruction to its application. In this study, therefore, wastewater secondary effluent is used for osmotic dilution of seawater. Firstly, fouling behaviour of RO by simulating wastewater effluent in osmotic dilution process was measured and we calculated energy consumption of overall desalination process by theoretical equations and commercial program. Our results reveal that RO membrane fouling can be efficiently controlled by pre-treatment systems such as nano filtration (NF) or forward osmosis (FO) process. Especially FO system for osmotic dilution process is a non-pressurized membrane system and, therefore, the operating energy consumption of overall desalination system was the lowest. Moreover, fouling layer on FO membrane is comparatively weak and reversible enough to be disrupted by physical cleaning. Thus, RO system with low salinity feed water through FO process is possible as a less energy consuming desalination system with efficient membrane fouling control.

• Journal of Korean Society on Water Environment
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• v.35 no.6
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• pp.567-573
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• 2019

DABF(Dissolve Air Flotation with Ball Filter) is developed as the DAF with the addition of a fiber ball at the lower part of the DAF. The DABF with a capacity of 4,500 ㎥/h was constructed at Gijang SWRO plant in Busan. Since the ball filter has high filtration rate, the loading rate of DABF was designed from 20 to 42 ㎥/h/㎡. When one DABF basin is in the back washing mode, the loading rate of other two DABF basins is increased to 42 ㎥/h/㎡. Turbidity at the BF outlet in DABF is <2 NTU at turbidity of 5-10 NTU at the BF inlet. If there is no algae bloom and turbidity is low in raw seawater, only BF in DABF is operated and meets <2 NTU at the BF outlet. Even if BF is operated at high hydraulic loading rates, no significant differential pressure increases and reduction in the turbidity removal rate is minimal in a day. Thus, DABF is the pre-treatment technology that provides stable water quality even with BF onlyoperation without DAF operation. Compared with the DAF, DABF requires additional facilities such as valves, piping, and drainage systems for backwashing the BF. But in terms of footprint and operating costs, DABF has more advantages than DAF. With DABF application, the load of the downstream filtration equipment is decreased so that the capacity of the filtration equipment can be reduced. Also, if the downstream filtration equipment is to be maintained the same regardless of DABF, the operating cost of DABF is less than DAF.

• Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.205-212
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• 2011

Reverse osmosis (RO) technology has developed over the past 40 years to control a 44% market share in the world desalting production capacity and an 80% share in the total number of desalination plants installed worldwide. The application of conventional and low-pressure membrane pretreatment processes to seawater RO (SWRO) desalination has undergone accelerated development over the past decade. Reliable pretreatment techniques are required for the successful operation of SWRO processes, since a major issue is membrane fouling associated with particulate matter/colloids, organic/inorganic compounds, and biological growth. While conventional pretreatment processes such as coagulation and granular media filtration have been widely used for SWRO, there has been an increased tendency toward the use of ultrafiltration/microfiltration (UF/MF) instead of conventional treatment techniques. The literature shows that both the conventional and the UF/MF membrane pretreatment processes have different advantages and disadvantages. This review suggests that, depending on the feed water quality conditions, the suitable integration of multiple pretreatment processes may be considered valid since this would utilize the benefits of each separate pretreatment.

• The Korean Journal of Ecology
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.217-224
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• 1998

The heavy metal concentrations of seawater collected from the Onsan coastal zone in February and July 1996 and mussels(Mytilus edulis) in February 1997 were analysed. The concentrations of cadmium in seawater were in the range of 0.008-2.988 ${\mu}g/L$, while the ranges of copper and zinc concentrations were 0.08-2.55, and 0.21-35.12 ${\mu}g/L$, respectively. The metal concentrations decreased gradually with increasing distances from Daejeong stream, indicating that this stream was the major source of heavy metal input into the Onsan coastal zone. The concentrations of cadmium, copper and zinc in mussels were in the ranges of 1.40-25.09, 8.5-64.5, and 46.8-291.2 ${\mu}g/g$, respectively. The metal concentrations decreased gradually with increasing distances from Daejeong stream. Among organs of mussels, gill showed the highest concentrations of cadmium and the digestive gland showed the highest concentrations of copper and for zine the kidney showed the highest concentrations. The digestive gland and kidney revealed high proportion of cadmium in cytosolic fraction and the percentage of copper was high in the kidney and that of zine was high in the digestive gland. Metal-binding protein of mussels collected from the mouth of Daejeong stream was separated, using gel-filtration chromatography. In the kidney and gill of mussels, most of cadmium was associated with metal-binding protein. In contrast, most of the metal in the digestive gland and remaining tissues is bound to high molecular weight protein rather than metal-binding protein.

• Journal of Korean Society of Water and Wastewater
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• v.33 no.6
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• pp.437-446
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• 2019

Reverse osmosis seawater desalination facilities can extend the cleaning cycle and replacement time of the reverse osmosis membrane by pretreatment process. Selection of pretreatment process depends on water quality. It was attempted in this study to select approriate pretreatment process for the Masan bay, which was high in particles and organic content. For this purpose, performances of pretreatment processes such as filter adsorber (FA), pore controllable fiber (PCF), and ultrafiltration (UF) were compared based on the silt density index (SDI). The SDI value of the filtrate should be less than 3. The study results showed that UF can produce the filtrate quality satisfying the requirement. However, the transmembrane pressure (TMP) of UF increased quickly, reaching 0.6 bar within 4 days. In order to secure stable operation, FA and PCF were combined with UF. The study results showed that combination of PCF and UF was able to extend the filtration duration (more than 2 months) until to reach TMP of 0.6 bar.