The sweet spot of forward osmosis: Treatment of produced water, drilling wastewater, and other complex and difficult liquid streams

Coday, Bryan D.; Xu, Pei; Beaudry, Edward G.; Herron, Jack; Lampi, Keith; Hancock, Nathan T.; Cath, Tzahi Y.

doi:10.1016/j.desal.2013.11.014

Cited by 344 publications

(183 citation statements)

References 95 publications

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“…Thermally-regenerated FO has also been modeled by Semiat et al [17]. An FO pilot system with RO regeneration (FO-RO) was used to concentrate low-salinity O&G wastewater [2,18]. FO-RO has also been suggested to be more efficient than RO for seawater desalination [19,20], but other studies have shown that this is unlikely [21,22].…”

Section: Assessment Of Technologiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this paper, we consider FO systems with regeneration except where noted. The efficacy of FO in O&G wastewater desalination has been demonstrated by several pilot plants with varying regeneration systems [2], but energy consumption has yet to be optimized. We will show that reductions in energy consumption may arise from improvements to the FO exchangers, regeneration systems, and system flow rate balance.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Forward osmosis (FO) is a promising technology for oil and gas (O&G) wastewater treatment [1,2] because it can concentrate wastewater to high salinities that are currently unattainable with reverse osmosis (RO). In FO, a stream is concentrated as water is drawn from it through a semi-permeable membrane by the high osmotic pressure of a draw solution.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Raising forward osmosis brine concentration efficiency through flow rate optimization

2015

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An exergetic efficiency is defined in order to compare brine concentration processes including forward osmosis (FO) across a wide range of salinities. We find that existing FO pilot plants have lower efficiency than reverse osmosis plants in the brackish and seawater salinity ranges. High salinity FO, in its current form, is still less efficient than mechanical vapor compression. We show that efficiency is the product of FO exchanger and draw regenerator efficiencies, and therefore FO system energy efficiency benefits from improvements to both. The mass flow rate ratio (between draw and feed flow rates) is identified as a crucial parameter in the design of efficient FO systems because of its effect on exchanger efficiency. We demonstrate a method of thermodynamically balancing an FO system by choosing flow rates that lead to equal osmotic pressure differences at both ends of the exchanger, and show the method's potential to increase efficiency by 3-21% based on current system designs.

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Section: Assessment Of Technologiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Raising forward osmosis brine concentration efficiency through flow rate optimization

2015

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“…Because the FO process is operated in the absence of applied hydraulic pressure, this process has an intrinsically lower fouling propensity and requires less energy than RO. [17] These advantages of the FO process have led to more than 1000 studies during the last decade for different applications. However, only 7% of these studies are related to wastewater treatment.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Influences of mechanical pretreatment on the non-biological treatment of municipal wastewater by forward osmosis

Hey

Zarebska

Bajraktari

et al. 2016

Environmental Technology

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“…Pure water permeates through the membrane into the draw stream and the diluted draw stream exiting the FO exchanger enters a "back-end" process, such as a distillation column or an RO system, for recovering the permeate and regenerating the draw solution [4]. Although FO is unlikely to replace RO for seawater desalination [5], researchers are still working to determine its viability for treating produced water [6,7] even though it does not perform well relative to other systems on an energetic basis [8,9].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

System scale analytical modeling of forward and assisted forward osmosis mass exchangers with a case study on fertigation

Banchik

Weiner

Al-Anzi

et al. 2016

Journal of Membrane Science

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Forward osmosis (FO) and assisted forward osmosis (AFO) mass exchangers are currently receiving considerable attention for their potential use in a variety of dilution and concentration applications in resource extraction, fertigation, and pharmaceutical process streams. In this work we develop analytical expressions for parallel and counterflow FO and AFO exchangers which can be used to quickly and accurately estimate the membrane area required for these applications in addition to determining the performance of existing exchangers. Unlike previous models, our analytical model accounts for internal and external concentration polarization in system scale exchangers with overall average errors of less than 10% against a numerical model and less than 35% validated against data from the literature. The performance of FO and AFO exchangers is compared, and an osmotic fertilizer dilution (fertigation) case study is investigated in which the trade-off between energy and membrane area requirements is quantified. We find that AFO exchangers yield a higher recovery relative to FO exchangers for a given energy input especially when the inlet draw-to-feed osmotic pressure ratio is low. Diminishing returns in recovery ratio are attained for increasing membrane area and increasing draw-to-feed mass flow rate ratio. We also find that for the same brackish feed water and recovery ratio, reductions in area of up to 40% relative to FO can be realized with 2 kWh/m 3 of energy input into an AFO system in the fertigation case study.

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The sweet spot of forward osmosis: Treatment of produced water, drilling wastewater, and other complex and difficult liquid streams

Cited by 344 publications

References 95 publications

Raising forward osmosis brine concentration efficiency through flow rate optimization

Raising forward osmosis brine concentration efficiency through flow rate optimization

Influences of mechanical pretreatment on the non-biological treatment of municipal wastewater by forward osmosis

System scale analytical modeling of forward and assisted forward osmosis mass exchangers with a case study on fertigation

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