Energy Recovery Strategies for Brackish RO Facilities with Varying Water Quality Conditions

This paper describes work to consider design with energy recovery systems for tidally influenced surface water sources that have wide variations in TDS and temperature The overall power consumption for the two turbocharger options, the motor assisted turbocharger option and the pressure exchanger system were evaluated. This demonstrates the sensitivity of the analysis to how well the turbocharger option can be optimized over the wide range of pressure and flow conditions for applications with wide variations in feed water TDS and temperature. There also appears to be some potential for further reducing power consumption for the pressure exchanger option if the throttling loss on the high pressure feed discharge can be reduced by better optimizing the interstage boost pressure.