Fifteen years of R&D program in seawater desalination at KISR Part II. RO system performance

Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research (KISR) and the Ministry of Electri city and Water (MEW) collaborated over the past 15 years in developing and adapting the seawater reverse osmosis (RO) technology to the Gulf seawater conditions (one and half time the salinity of open seas and large temperatu re variations between summer and winter in the range of 35 degreesC and 10 degreesC, respectively), The development process went through several stage s involving performance evaluation of three types of membrane configuration s under various operating conditions and using different types of feed wate r pretreatment techniques. It went also through the evaluation of various c ommercially available energy recovery systems and the development of a new system. During this period, the RO research program evaluated the performan ce of ten different seawater membranes, cleaning and restoration techniques and procedures, using various potential agents. Furthermore, computer aide d design program and process design and optimization procedures were develo ped specifically for Gulf seawater conditions, The studies also involved tw o-phase evaluation of multistage flash/reverse osmosis (MSF/RO) hybrid syst ems, Cost assessment of product water from RO under different operating con ditions and various system configurations was always an important integrate d part of each research project.