Bio-Fouling Control with Direct Coupled UF Pre-Treatment

This paper examines the experience of using submerged ultrafiltration (UF) for seawater desalination with reverse osmosis (SWRO) pretreatment for the GE Power and Water plant at Yuhuan in China and for Siemens Memcor in Adelaide Australia, exploring whether the elimination of the RO feed tank in these plants confers an advantage in biofouling control in practice. A comparison is drawn with two pressure-driven plants using Hydranautics UF at Kindasa in Saudi Arabia and for Pentair-X-flow at Beckton in London. The paper provides data from the four case studies and will illustrate the experience of biofouling, operational stability, and cleaning frequency of the SWRO system. The paper concludes with design and operating recommendations for UF-SWRO systems.