Performance Evaluation of Reverse Osmosis Desalination Pilot Plants using ROSA Simulation Software

Desalination allows the use of non-conventional water sources such as seawater for the production of potable water. The performance of three pilot plants in Mallard Slough, namely RO1, RO2 and NF3 were investigated. Reverse Osmosis System Analysis (ROSA), a simulation software was adopted for verifying the performance of the existing pilot plants in treating seawater. By inserting the specific system configuration and selecting the membrane specification of the pilot plants, ROSA would help to generate the operating parameters such as feed pressure, flux, recovery ratio, permeate quality of the plants. These results were subsequently being used to compare with the experimental data of the pilot plants to determine their absolute deviations. It was found that all ROSA simulated feed pressures for RO1, RO2 and NF3 fell in the range of operational feed pressures of the existing pilot plants. Besides, the deviation of total dissolved solutes removal between the results simulated by the ROSA software and the results obtained from the experiments were noticeably insignificant. In terms of flux and recovery ratio, the simulated results and the experimental data showed a marginal discrepancy with deviations < 2% and < 8% for RO1 and NF3, respectively. In conclusion, the findings of this study confirmed the feasibility of adopting this ROSA software to verify the performance of a pilot plant with all operational parameters being ideally optimized

Performance Evaluation of Reverse Osmosis Desalination Pilot Plants using ROSA Simulation Software

Desalination allows the use of non-conventional water sources such as seawater for the production of potable water. The performance of three pilot plants in Mallard Slough, namely RO1, RO2 and NF3 were investigated. Reverse Osmosis System Analysis (ROSA), a simulation software was adopted for verifying the performance of the existing pilot plants in treating seawater. By inserting the specific system configuration and selecting the membrane specification of the pilot plants, ROSA would help to generate the operating parameters such as feed pressure, flux, recovery ratio, permeate quality of the plants. These results were subsequently being used to compare with the experimental data of the pilot plants to determine their absolute deviations. It was found that all ROSA simulated feed pressures for RO1, RO2 and NF3 fell in the range of operational feed pressures of the existing pilot plants. Besides, the deviation of total dissolved solutes removal between the results simulated by the ROSA software and the results obtained from the experiments were noticeably insignificant. In terms of flux and recovery ratio, the simulated results and the experimental data showed a marginal discrepancy with deviations < 2% and < 8% for RO1 and NF3, respectively. In conclusion, the findings of this study confirmed the feasibility of adopting this ROSA software to verify the performance of a pilot plant with all operational parameters being ideally optimized