Reverse Osmosis

Objectives
Reverse osmosis is one of the more important chemical engineering
applications. Other than desalination, RO systems are also important in water
treatment and waste remediation processes. Our experiment will focus on the
material balance and mass transfer aspects of the process.
Specifically, the goals of this project are:
To apply mass transfer fundamentals to the analysis of reverse osmosis
To apply material balance to analyze and design the operation of a
system with retentate recycle
To apply the results in scale-up calculations

References
Reverse osmosis is an established technology but it remains an active
research field, including the use of nanofiltration membranes. In the research
arena, you'd find some of the latest progresses in the journals Desalination,
and Journal of Membrane Science. Saying that, all the things that you need to
understand the experiment dated back half a century because our simple
setup is geared toward teaching you "process engineering." For that, all you
need is a few key references. The follow suggestions take you to more recent
publications.
Your textbooks in mass transfer and separations.
Alghoul, M.A. , Poovanaesvaran, P., Sopian, K., and Sulaiman, M.Y.
(2009). Review of brackish water reverse osmosis (BWRO) system
designs, Renew. Sustain. Energy Rev., 13, 2661-2667.
A good review; and brackish water is indeed what we do
Fritzmann, C., Lwenberg, J., Wintgens, T., and Melin, T. (2007). State-ofthe-art of reverse osmosis desalination, Desalination, 216, 1-76.
A very long review because it has much non-technical information,
which we don't want to see in your report
Hung, L. Y., Lue, S. J., and You, J. H. (2011). Mass-transfer modeling of
reverse-osmosis performance on 0.5-2% salty water, Desalination, 265,
67-73.
Malaeb, L., and Ayoub, G. M. (2011). Reverse osmosis technology for
water treatment: State of the art review, Desalination, in press.
Maybe it will be in print by the time you have to search for this one
Ma, S., Kassinos, S. C., and Kassinos, D. F. (2008). Assessing the impact
of concentration-dependent fluid properties on concentration polarization
in crossflow membrane systems, Ind. Eng. Chem. Res., 47, 1636-1649.
A sort of FYI type reference. Unlikely we can study that with our setup
but this is a reminder that concentration polarization is an important
problem

Preparation
The key is to read the section on reverse osmosis in your CENG 122 text, and
review the mass transfer theories related to this section.

General Guidelines
Generally, there are two sets of experiments:
1. Study the effects of pressure and flow rate the performance of the RO
system (for example, rejection coefficient and recovery) under steady
state operating conditions. Depending on the setup, we may have
either one membrane module or two modules in series.
2. Study the performance of the RO system with retentate recycle.
Compare the results with design estimations.