• Membrane and Water Treatment
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.239-250
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• 2011

A photovoltaic powered ultrafiltration and reverse osmosis system was tested with a number of natural groundwaters in Australia. The objective of this study was to compare system performance at six remote field locations by assessing the impact of water composition and fluctuating energy on inorganic contaminant removal using a BW30-4040 membrane. Solar irradiance directly affected pressure and flow. Groundwater characteristics (including TDS, salts, heavy metals, and pH), impacted other performance parameters such as retention, specific energy consumption and flux. During continual system operation, retention of ions such as $Ca^{2+}$ and $Mg^{2+}$ was high (> 95%) with each groundwater which can be attributed to steric exclusion. The retention of smaller ions such as $NO_3{^-}$ was affected by weather conditions and groundwater composition, as convection/diffusion dominate retention. When solar irradiance was insufficient or fluctuations too great for system operation, performance deteriorated and retention dropped significantly (< 30% at Ti Tree). Groundwater pH affected flux and retention of smaller ions ($NO_3{^-}$ and $F^-$) because charge repulsion increases with pH. The results highlight variations in system performance (ion retention, flux, specific energy consumption) with real solar irradiance, groundwater composition, and pH conditions.

• Journal of Korean Society of Water and Wastewater
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• v.26 no.6
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• pp.807-813
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• 2012

Flocculation and flotation are used as pretreatment steps prior to the reverse osmosis (RO) process. During seawater treatment, high temperature can change the water chemistry of seawater during the process of coagulation. It also affects bubble volume concentration (BVC) and bubble characteristics. Coagulants such as alum and ferric salts at $40^{\circ}C$ can also change flux rates in the seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) process. In this study, the bubble characteristics in dissolved air flotation (DAF), used as a SWRO pretreatment process, were studied in synthetic seawater at $20^{\circ}C$ and $40^{\circ}C$. The flux of an RO membrane was monitored after dosing the synthetic seawater with coagulants at different temperatures. Results showed that BVC increases as the operating pressure increases and as the salt concentration decreases. The bubble size released at $40^{\circ}C$ is far smaller than that at $20^{\circ}C$The addition of a ferric salt is effective for turbidity removal in synthetic seawater at $20^{\circ}C$; it is more effective than alum. When synthetic seawater was dosed with a ferric salt, the RO membrane flux increased by 27 % at $40^{\circ}C$.

• Membrane Journal
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.155-162
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• 2000

The reverse osmosis membrane housing(HY) was developed for excellent distribution of a feed solution, and the separation performance was compared with the commercialized Rochem(RC) system. The permeation flux of HY system was a little lower than that of RC system. On the other hand, the NaCl rejection ra4io was generally higher. Also, the permeation flux and rejection ratio for type A, B and C modules(disc plate and frame type) were measured using NaCl, sucrose and butanol solutions. The separation performance of type C module for NaCL and sucrose solutions was the most effective, and then those of type A and B were followed, respectively. However, the separation performance for butanol solution was type B, C and A order. The flux improvement ratio of type B to A increased as butanol concentration decreased or operating pressure increased up to 28 bar.

• Journal of Korean Society of Water and Wastewater
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.143-155
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• 2010

Fouling by inorganic scales needs to be prevented to effectively operate sea water reverse osmosis(SWRO) membrane systems. The extents of inorganic scaling with different array designs including one-pass, two-pass and several hybrid designs were evaluated using seawater from southern sea near the city of Chang-Won. The used methods for evaluation were Stiff and Davis Index(S&DSI) calculation and several laboratory experiments. The formation potential of inorganic scale fouling was quite great under the examined conditions, which was confirmed by the laboratory experimental results. The inorganic scale was not avoidable fouling if any anti-scaling measures were not applied. The RO showed decreased flux under the scale formation conditions. The increases in S&DSI from 1.43 to 5 made small decreases in flux, which indicated that formation of inorganic scales had more substantial effects on RO flux than amount of inorganic scales.

• Membrane Journal
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.273-280
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• 2016

Pressure assisted forward osmosis (PAFO) is recently introduced because of its improved process efficiency to overcome drawbacks of forward osmosis (FO) such as low water flux and reverse solute diffusion. However, it is known that membrane fouling becomes deteriorated by additional hydraulic pressure applied in PAFO compared to FO. This study was performed to investigate possibility of intermittent pressure-assisted forward osmosis (I-PAFO) operation for fouling mitigation using colloidal silica particles as model foulants. FO, PAFO were operated as well to compare with. Two different solution pH conditions (pH 3, 10) were applied to see the effect of electrostatic interactions between the membrane and silica particles on fouling tendency. In the results, higher water flux was observed during pressurization and pressure relaxation periods in I-PAFO than water flux of PAFO, and FO on both pH conditions. Water flux decreased less in I-PAFO than PAFO after fouling. It resulted in higher water flux recovery in I-PAFO than PAFO after physical cleaning.

• 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.

• Membrane Journal
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• v.26 no.5
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• pp.391-400
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• 2016

In this work, novel thin film composite (TFC) forward osmosis (FO) membranes are developed via interfacial polymerization on the polysulfone (PS) substrate, using TEOS as the a sol-gel reagent to form hydrophilic interlayer polymer between PS and polyamide (PA). The PS substrate was cast on a very thin polyester nonwoven to reduce membrane resistance. With the incorporation of TEOS (tetraethoxy silane) polymer in the interface between PS and PA, the formed TFC FO membrane exhibits better hydrophilicity and improved water flux, and therefore superior membrane performance. By changing the polymerization sequence of PA interfacial polymerization and TEOS sol-gel condensation, the surface properties and performance of FO membranes are changed significantly. The permeability of FO membranes were estimated using the bench-scale FO test equipment. The distribution of the polysiloxane on composite membrane and morphology are also studied with FE-SEM and EDAX. The PS_PA_TEOS membrane showed highly enhanced water flux (79.2 LMH) but reverse salt flux (RSF) value (7.10 GMH) also increased. However, the flux of PS_TEOS_PA membrane increased moderately (54.1 LMH) without increasing RSF value (1.60 GMH) compare with PS_PA membrane.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Soil and Groundwater Environment Conference
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• 2002.04a
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• pp.243-245
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• 2002

Brackish water desalination using reverse osmosis(RO) membrane is more useful and economic than sea water to solve the shortage of fresh water supply because of its low total dissolved solid(TDS) contents. Silica and humic acid in brackish water make serious fouling problems and cause the decline of permeate flux and increase of operating pressure. In this study, the experiments for removal of silica and humic acid were conducted with calcite particles to prevent membrane fouling and investigated the effect of pH of feed water Adsorption of silica to calcite was higher at pH=7.5 than 9.5 and removal rate was increased according to increase of initial concentration of silica. The effect of pH on adsorption of humic acid was not significant but at low initial concentration the adsorption of humic acid was enhanced at pH 7.5. The result of this study expect to apply to brackish water desalination experiment of flat-sheet reverse osmosis membrane.

• Membrane Journal
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.320-329
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• 2005

Polyamide membrane degradation by chlorine has been studied to improve membrane durability. In this study, it was found that the salt rejection was reduced rapidly and flux of the membrane was increased slowly far membrane treated under chlorine condition. In order to improve resistance to chlorine of the polyamide reverse osmosis membrane, fluorine-containing silane coupling agent (FSCA) was introduced to surface modification. Surface properties and chlorine resistance of silane modified membrane were compared with virgin membrane. It was found that the surface of silane modified membrane has dense structure according to FSCA concentration increasing. The results of surface analysis suggest that FSCA retrieved a severe change in the hydrophobicity and surface roughness. In addition, it appears that FSCA can enhance chlorine resistance due to the interaction of such substance with free radical chlorine.

• Membrane Journal
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• v.28 no.4
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• pp.286-295
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• 2018

A novel multi-valent salt based on polyethyleneimine having molecular weight of 800 (PEI 800) has been synthesized and characterized as forward osmosis draws solute. A reaction intermediate was synthesized by the neutralization reaction of polyethyleneimine and methyl acrylate, and was hydrolyzed with potassium hydroxide to synthesize a water soluble carboxylic acid (potassium salt) polyethyleneimine. NMR spectrometry, viscometry measurements and osmometry measurements was performed to characterize the draw solute. Forward osmosis experiments were done to know whether the solute could be used as a draw solute or not. The result shows comparable water flux and lower reverse salt flux compared with NaCl as a draw solute. We have also demonstrated recycling of the draw solute in the FO-NF integrated process.