Frost: Demand for Cleaner Water Drives Desalination Technologies

July 30, 2007 // Published as a news service by IHS

"In wastewater treatment, the treated water could be reused for industrial process, such as cooling water, boiler feed, process water and heavy construction," said Frost & Sullivan research analyst Rebecca Bright.

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"The pace of advancements in desalination of water and wastewater has been high in the last five years, and the scientific community is still researching various methods to improve existing methods of desalination."

Due to the significant advancements in membrane and thermal technologies, the unit price of treated water has decreased by approximately 50% or more.

A major membrane manufacturer is also looking at ways to improve membrane performance by looking at alternative approaches to design, configuration and elements.

Desalination technologies require pretreatment in wastewater and, in some cases, pretreatment in water.

In reverse osmosis (RO), for example, pretreatment is essential when particles such as sticks, leaves, trash, grease, suspended solids, organic substances, colloidal substances and odor need to be removed.

This prevents fouling and clogging of the membrane, which otherwise would reduce the efficiency of the membrane and decrease the quality of water generated.

"While pretreatment adds to the capital investment cost and deters widespread uptake, this will eventually even out as the efficiency of the treatment is higher and the life of the membrane is longer,” said Bright. "The Tampa Bay project in California, which was supposed to be commissioned by 2003, is a good, large-scale example of failure due to the lack of proper pretreatment facilities."

To overcome challenges demonstrated by the conventional pretreatment process, water treatment industries have piloted new treatment technologies and utilized full-scale pre-treatment of raw water. Analysts said CH2M Hill International has described new technologies, such as dissolved air floatation (DAF), low-pressure membrane filtration, ultra filtration (UF) and micro filtration (MF).

Source: Frost & Sullivan.