PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF REVERSE OSMOSIS PROCESS BASED ON THE POTENTIAL SYNERGY OF (PROCESS DESIGN – RSM) METHODOLOGIES

Reverse Osmosis process is a desalination process for production high quality drinking and industrial water. For describing and modelling any production processes including RO process the data availability and accessibility is the first prerequisite. In the current work an idea is adopted of making a synergy between two software to form basis for new developments in data collection and analysis for studying and optimizing the parameters affecting the performance of RO facilities served in Kurdistan Region-Iraq. The first software is employed as a statistical tool used to optimize and model the effect of the RO operating variables employed in the investigated pilot plants. The second software is used for output data generation related to RO membrane information for membrane selection and process design and operation. The combined features of the two software are used to identify and optimize perfectly the effect of membrane age, % recovery, (concentration of salts, pH, temperature and pressure) of feed water and the rejected brine concentration. The results obtained showed that increasing the concentration of salts in feed water, % recovery, feed temperature, acidic feed pH and no. of stages affect inversely the performance of the process. Opposite effect was predicted for concentration of the rejected brine. The age of the membrane seemed of not significant on the factors investigated. The mathematical model estimated showed the effect of the three major factors; feed salt concentration, pressure and temperature, has been estimated with high regression factor confirming the best fitting of the model with the input data.