Please join the Barrer Centre on 24 November for a seminar on improved recovery and energy efficient reverse osmosis process.

The seminar will be led by Prof Chong Tzyy Haur (Nanyang Technological University).

Abstract

The challenge of reverse osmosis (RO) technology is to improve the water recovery at modest energy consumption.  The recovery of conventional single-stage RO (SSRO) process is limited by the osmotic pressure of the final brine.  Here, a novel energy-efficient reverse osmosis (EERO) process, that combines SSRO and a counter-current membrane cascade with recycling (CMCR), capitalizes on the performance of SSRO by using its brine as feed to a CMCR.  The EERO process reduces the osmotic pressure differential (OPD) by (i) employing nanofiltration (NF) membrane that provides retentate self-recycling, and (ii) employing multi-pass processing of permeate in the CMCR. Both simulation and pilot plant data shows promising results to achieve higher recovery at modest energy consumption than existing technology. In addition, to improve the mass transfer and to reduce fouling in the spiral wound module (SWM) of RO, novel feed channel spacers are fabricated via additive manufacturing (AM) technique and their performance are assessed by the optical coherence tomography (OCT) technique.       

Bio

Tzyy Haur CHONG received a BE in chemical engineering from the University of New South Wales in Sydney Australia and a PhD in civil and environmental engineering from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He was a Research Fellow from 2008 to 2011 and a Senior Research Fellow from 2011 to 2014 in the Singapore Membrane Technology Center at Nanyang Technological University. In 2014, he joined the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Nanyang Technological University as an Assistant Professor. Concurrently, since 2014 he has been serving as the Deputy Director of the Singapore Membrane Technology Center. He specializes in membranes for water desalination and reclamation. His interests include developing physical, chemical and biological approaches to prevent and mitigate membrane fouling; techniques for characterization of fouling processes; module design and hydrodynamics; energy related to membrane processes.