Comparison of the Results of Pretreatment to Seawater Reverse Osmosis Systems in California, Florida, and Texas

This paper addresses technical issues within the desalination community by presenting a performance comparison of three membrane pretreatment systems. The success or any seawater desalination facility relies almost entirely on the capability of the pretreatment and preconditioning processes to provide suitable-quality, pre-filtered seawater to the reverse osmosis membrane. Membrane pretreatment offers the potential to eliminate some of the operational and filtrate quality issues which plague many conventional media filtration systems treating seawater.