Optimization of Pre-treatment for Reverse Osmosis (RO) Desalination of Inorganic Wastewater Effluent

This paper describes an in-depth investigation of a steel companies waste water by looking at the feed water quality including size fractionation and chemical analyses of feed water constituents, bench scale fouling and scaling studies while applying some proprietary geochemical and RO process modeling tools. From these analyses, they were able to pinpoint critical performance limiting constituents in the feed water, and then, perform Ultrafiltration (UF )and reverse osmosis (RO) membrane autopsy?s, recommend optimal pre-treatment process sequence, RO membrane selection, and RO product water recovery.