Challenges and potentials of forward osmosis process in the treatment of wastewater

Abstract

An emerging osmotically driven membrane process, forward osmosis has attracted growing attention in the field of desalination and wastewater treatment. The present study provides a critical review of the forward osmosis process for wastewater treatment focussing on most recent studies. Forward osmosis is one of the technologies that has been widely studied for the treatment of a wide range of wastewater because of its low fouling and energy consumption compared to conventional techniques for wastewater treatment. To date, forward osmosis has limited applications in the field of wastewater treatment due to several technical and economic concerns. Although membrane cost is one of the critical issues that limit the commercial application of forward osmosis, there are other obstacles such as membrane fouling, finding an ideal draw solution that can easily be recycled, concentration polarisation and reverse salt diffusion. Innovative technologies for in-situ real-time fouling monitoring can give us new insights into fouling mechanisms and fouling control strategies in forward osmosis. This study evaluated recent advancements in forward osmosis technology for wastewater treatment and the main challenges that need to be addressed in future research work.

Detecting the optimal condition of Zeolite utilization in industrial wastewater treatment by using the fuzzy simulation model

“…5, if the TDS L was "low" then the COD E was "high", and conversely, if the TDS L was "high" then the COD E was "low", so that there had closed to the The highest regression coefficient of the tested linear and non-linear models to simulate the variations of EC E with of TTS L were less than 0.5, and after that used the curve fitting approach with and without normalized data to achieve a function of EC E from the day of t with TSSL from the day of t-1. These approaches couldn't improve the regression coefficient of each linear and nonlinear function too [34,12]. Based on the results of clustering analysis, the ranges of the EC E from the day of t, and TTS L from the day of t-1 variables had classified into three major classes.…”

“…Other concerns include the salinity and water infiltration rate in the soil [36], as well as heavy metal accumulation and pollution caused by nutrient leaching [10]. Nevertheless, the use of treated wastewater is a global phenomenon in a variety of applications in more than fifty countries throughout the world as reported by [26,12].…”

Organic Fouling in Forward Osmosis: A Comprehensive Review

“…The CTA membrane shows more resistance to organic fouling than the commercial TFC membrane in both the FO and the Pressure retarded osmosis (PRO) mode [104]. For this reason, the majority of the studies in the FO literature use the CTA membrane for wastewater treatment applications [120,121] and are compared to TFC membranes. Some studies have reported excellent antifouling behaviour (for model organic foulants) for laboratory fabricated TFC membranes known as thin-film nanocomposite membranes [122].…”

Membrane Fouling Behavior of Forward Osmosis for Fruit Juice Concentration

“…Many studies have concluded that compared with the reverse osmosis (RO) process, the FO process has a better water recovery, lower membrane fouling propensity and much better energy efficiency [6]. The advantages of the FO process are low-energy consumption and low concentration polarization on the membrane surface, i.e., lesser membrane fouling than RO [6][7][8]. The FO process has been successfully studied in various applications such as wastewater recovery [9,10], seawater desalination [11], power generation and food processing [5].…”