Performance restoration and autopsy of NF membranes used in seawater pretreatment

Cleaning results of new and fouled nanofiltration membrane characterized by contact angle, updated DSPM, flux and salts rejection

“…Table 1 shows the name and concentration of cleaning agents used in the tests. The commercial cleaning agents are similar to that used in the Umm-Lujj commercial NF plant [18].…”

“…The deposit analyses results revealed that natural organic matter was the main constituent of the foulant material. More details of the plant operation and DK membrane autopsy results can be found elsewhere [18]. Prior to the experiments, all virgin NF and fouled membranes were soaked over night with or without cleaning agents in high purity water obtained from Millipore Elix 3 unit.…”

A comprehensive review on surface modified polymer membranes for biofouling mitigation

“…Natural organic matter (NOM) is the main organic foulant for membrane treatment of surface waters, brackish waters and sea water [10]. It has been demonstrated that the hydrophobic fraction of NOM was the major factor causing permeate flux decline due to strong adsorption on the membrane surface, while the hydrophilic fraction of NOM had a relatively small effect on the membrane fouling [11].…”

Fouling of nanofiltration and reverse osmosis membranes during municipal wastewater reclamation: Membrane autopsy results from pilot-scale investigations

“…Up to date, membrane autopsies have mainly focused on seawater desalination [7,[27][28][29], brackish groundwater desalination [4,8,30,31], and surface water [32]. Despite the substantial effort in understanding the fundamentals of membrane fouling, knowledge about fouling during water reclamation applications at pilot-and full-scale is limited.…”