초순수 제조 공정의 폐수발생량 저감을 위한 역삼투 공정 고회수율 설계

High recovery reverse osmosis design to minimize wastewater of ultra-pure water production process

The production process of ultra-pure water (UPW) involves dozens of unit processes such as reverse osmosis (RO), pretreatments, membrane degasifier, and several ion exchange processes. Recently, continuous electrodeionization (CEDI) has replaced the 2-bed and 3-tower (2B3T) ion exchange process. As a result, the majority of wastewater in UPW production now comes from the RO concentrate. The important of RO in UPW production is to produce high-quality water with a low ion concentration (around 1 mg/L) for CEDI feed water. Minimizing RO concentrate is essential to reduce the wastewater produced in the UPW production process. This can be achieved by maximizing the recovery of the RO system. However, increasing the recovery is limited by the water quality of the RO permeate. To ensure high-quality permeate water, the RO system is designed with a two-pass configuration. The recovery of each pass in the RO system is limited (e.g., < 85%) due to the expected increase in permeate water concentration at higher RO feed water concentrations. Interestingly, tests using 4-inch RO modules with low concentration feed water (≤ 35 mg/L as NaCl) revealed that the permeate concentration remains almost constant regardless of the feed water concentration. This implies that the recovery of the first RO pass can be increased as long as the average feed/concentrate concentration of the second RO pass is less than 35 mg/L. According to this design criterion for the RO system, the recovery of the first and second RO pass, with a feed water concentration of 250 mg/L as NaCl, can be increased up to 94.8% and 96.0%, respectively. Compared to the conventional RO system design (e.g., 70% and 80% for the first and second RO pass) for UPW production, this maximum recovery design reduces the volume of RO feed and concentrate by up to 38.4% and 89.2%, respectively.