• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.42 no.3
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• pp.351-357
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• 2022

A conventional seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) and a forward osmosis (FO) and reverse osmosis (RO) hybrid process to produce 1,000 m³/d of fresh water, were designed and compared in terms of carbon emission. When FO was adapted for the osmotic dilution, the required pressure for RO decreases, and thus energy consumption decreases. The decrease in carbon emission by decreased energy consumption (up to -0.73 kgCO₂/m³ using coal as the energy source) was compared with the increase in carbon emission by the FO system (+0.16 kgCO₂/m³), which is a function of various factors such as the number of FO modules and energy consumption. The comparison revealed that the FO-RO process causes less carbon emission compared with the SWRO process when the energy sources are coal and oil. However, if energy sources with low carbon emission such as solar, wind, and nuclear energy are selected, the carbon emission of the FO-RO process becomes higher than that of the SWRO process. This implies that the type of energy source is a key factor to determine the necessity of the FO-RO process from the aspect of carbon emission.

• Journal of Korean Society of Water and Wastewater
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• v.30 no.5
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• pp.521-532
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• 2016

Seawater desalination market after global economic crisis has been stalled due to the market uncertainties and decreased demand in desalination. It is important to review the status of the market and to estimate the appropriate share of Forward osmosis-Reverse Osmosis (FO-RO) hybrid desalination technology by figuring out the outlook of the desalination market. Main part of the desalination market will still be MENA (Middle East and North Africa) in the near future due to the fast population increase and high dependency of fossil fuel in the region. The market for FO-RO hybrid technology, however, might be smaller than the conventional SWRO desalination market anyway because of aesthetic issues from using wastewater as raw water and higher costs associated with capex. Therefore, it is essential to improve FO membrane performance and system operation technologies in order to make the hybrid technology attractive compared to the conventional SWRO technology.

• Journal of Korean Society of Water and Wastewater
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• v.32 no.4
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• pp.357-361
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• 2018

Forward osmosis (FO) process has been attracting attention for its potential applications such as industrial wastewater treatment, wastewater reclamation and seawater desalination. Particularly, in terms of fouling reversibility and operating energy consumption, the FO process is assumed to be preferable to the reverse osmosis (RO) process. Despite these advantages, there is a difficulty in the empirical step due to the lack of separation and recovery techniques of the draw solution. Therefore, rather than using FO alone, recent developments of the FO process have adapted a hybrid system without draw solution separation/recovery systems, such as the FO-RO osmotic dilution system. In this study, we investigated the performance of the hollow fiber FO module according to various operating conditions. The change of permeate flow rate according to the flow rates of the draw and feed solutions in the process operation is a factor that increases the permeate flow rate, one of the performance factors in the positive osmosis process. Our results reveal that flow rates of draw and feed solutions affect the membrane performance, such as the water flux and the reverse solute flux. Moreover, use of hydraulic pressure on the feed side was shown to yield slightly higher flux than the case without applied pressure. Thus, optimizing the operating conditions is important in the hollow fiber FO system.

• 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 $2.5kWh/m^3$.

• Journal of Korean Society of Water and Wastewater
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.131-137
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• 2016

The development of alternative water resources has emerged as an effective method for solving drought of water resources due to extreme weather and increase in water consumption. Recently, in Korea, there has been active research on reverse osmosis desalination technology, wastewater reuse using forward osmosis membranes, and the forward osmosis(FO)-reverse osmosis(RO) hybrid process combining these two technologies. In this study, the basic performance of FO membranes manufactured by three domestic and international manufactures such as Microfilter Co., Ltd., Toray Chemical Korea Inc., and Hydration Technologies Inc., were investigated for wastewater reuse. In addition, as an experiment to select feed solution, the selected membranes were operated 48 consecutive hours using three secondary effluents pretreated by the UF membrane with a pore size of $0.1{\mu}m$ and auto strainer with pore sizes of $1{\mu}m$ and $100{\mu}m$ as feed solution. Although there was not much difference in the operating performance. Thus, the treated water using the $100{\mu}m$ auto strainer was selected as feed solution applied to the assessment.