Membrane desalination and water re-use for agriculture: State of the art and future outlook

Abstract

Membrane-based desalination technologies for agricultural applications are widely applied in many countries around the world. Sustainable and cost-effective desalination technologies, such as reverse osmosis (RO), membrane distillation, forward osmosis, membrane bioreactor, and electrodialysis, are available to provide treated water, but the pure water product does not 1 Introduction 5-8 2 Applicability of membrane desalination technologies for fertigation 8-10 3 Water quality required for agricultural irrigation 10-12 4 Challenges in membrane technologies development 12-15 Water nutrient production from seawater/brackish water 15-28 5.1 Pressure-driven membrane process 15-19 5.1.1 RO process 15-17 5.1.2 NF process 17-19 5.1.3 FO process 19-22 5.2 Chemical-driven membrane process 23-28 5.2.1 Electrodialysis (ED) process 23-25 5.2.2 Capacitive Deionization (CDI) process 25-28 6 Water nutrient production from industrial wastewater 28-39 6.1 Pressure-driven membrane process 28-31 6.2 FO process 31-34 6.3 Temperature-driven membrane system 34-36 6.4 Membrane bioreactor (MBRs) process 36-39 7 Application of hybrid systems for agriculture 39-58

Electrodialytic Processes: Market Overview, Membrane Phenomena, Recent Developments and Sustainable Strategies

“…Further real-life experiments would confirm these encouraging results and clarify the sustainability of the strategy. Other alternatives for irrigation water production include FO-ED hybrid systems due to the low power consumption inherent to FO [ 298 ]. Most of those approaches are based on wastewater and will be developed in Section 5.2.1 .…”

“…The OMBR includes biological treatment in the feed compartment of a conventional FO in order to improve water recovery. However, salt accumulation in FO tends to induce flux reduction and scaling in such systems, even leading to reverse fluxes of soluble species [ 298 ]. The addition of an ED step to desalinate the feed mitigated this phenomenon while allowing salt concentration in the draw.…”

“…Satisfactory water flux was achieved over 24 days for moderate energy consumption (1.9 kWh/m³) [ 307 ]. A similar process was tested by Zou and He [ 308 ] as part of a strategy for water reclamation and fertigation (fertilization of crops by using water-soluble nutrients in irrigation waters [ 298 ]). Using a fertilizer (diammonium phosphate) solution as the draw leads to efficient water recovery (96.6% with 0.8 kWh/m³ power consumption).…”

“…As previously mentioned, electrodialytic technologies demonstrates suitable feasibility for the separation of nutrients used in agriculture as fertilizers. The retrieved chemicals are water-soluble supporting their potential for fertigation [ 298 ]. Potassium sulfate (K 2 SO 4 ) was produced by SED [ 321 ] and EDM coupled with a NF module (EDM-NF) [ 145 ].…”

Recent Progress in One- and Two-Dimensional Nanomaterial-Based Electro-Responsive Membranes: Versatile and Smart Applications from Fouling Mitigation to Tuning Mass Transport

“…However, despite the wide use of membrane-based technologies, there remain several issues that need to be improved, such as membrane fouling, energy consumption, and low removal efficacy toward some contaminants [ 6 ]. Since these issues are mainly associated with the properties of membranes, many studies were focused on the enhancement of membrane characteristics (surface chemistry and pore structure) and the development of advanced membranes using novel building blocks (e.g., aquaporin, one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) nanomaterials) with excellent properties, e.g., antibacterial effect, ultrafast water transport route, and precise molecular sieving [ 7 , 8 , 9 ].…”