Standardized Data and Trending for RO Plant Operators

Reverse Osmosis Chemistry — Basics, Barriers and Breakthroughs

“…Clean-in-place equipment in each RO plant provides the ability to clean the system by recirculating appropriate cleaning solutions through the membrane elements. To avoid channeling of cleaning solutions during cleaning by excessive foulants, the system performance must be carefully monitored by trending normalized permeate flow rate, differential pressure and salt passage [3,4]. Effective cleaning is needed when performance by these parameters drop by 10-15% to fully restore performance.…”

“…For off-the-shelf small to mediumsized RO systems, or where water quality analysis is incomplete or not available, effective general-purpose antiscalants at a safe dosage can be prescribed, which will perform satisfactorily in almost every case. By carefully monitoring with input of daily sets of operating data into personal computer programs that can generate trend-charts of normalized permeate flow rate, differential pressure and salt passage, RO system performance can be kept within 10-15% of the performance at startup [4]. With appropriate maintenance cleaning method, and timely adjustments in the choice of antiscalant and dosage if scaling appears, cleaning frequency can be kept to a minimum, and membrane service life can be extended to > 15 years.…”