Article title: Optimisation of energy consumption in a medium-scale reverse osmosis brackish water desalination plant Article authors: Alanood A. Alsarayreh, M. A. Al-Obaidi , A. M. Al-Hroub, R. Patel , and I. M. Mujtaba  Name of journal: Proceedings of the 30th European Symposium on Computer Aided Process Engineering  (ESCAPE30) Date of publication: May 24-27, 2020

Article abstract :

The Reverse Osmosis (RO) process has been universally employed for the production of potable water from brackish water resources. However, the RO process still operates at an elevated level of an energy consumption, in kWh per m3 of product water, due to the use of high-pressure pumps. In this study, an earlier steady-state operation model developed by the same authors for a medium-scale RO brackish water desalination system of Arab Potash Company (APC) (Jordan) is embedded within an optimisation framework. Typically, the optimisation problem is expressed as a Nonlinear Programming problem to attain the lowest specific energy consumption (objective function), as well as optimising the decision variables of operating flow rate and pressure for a given feed concentration and temperature. Moreover, the optimisation problem has been associated with upper and lower limits of decision variables as characterised by the membrane manufacturer. Also, to quantify the high-standards of filtration process, feasible constraints of the pressure loss along the x-axis of membrane length and upper and lower bound of feed flow rate of each membrane are considered. Interestingly, detailed optimisation results have conceived the optimal operating conditions that have the potential to gain net energy saving of RO system by 35%, whilst fulfilling the need for producing high-quality water. This research has economically upgraded the RO system of APC with a substantial improvement of process performance.