Chemical cleaning of reverse osmosis membranes

Membrane technology has become of great interest for treatment of different water feeds including seawater. Depending on the membrane type, materials in the feed and process conditions the membrane will lose its performance d uring time. Fouling is the most important problem associated with the appli cation of membranes. A strategy for membrane regeneration is chemical clean ing of the fouled membranes. One of the major applications of reverse osmos is membranes is processing of water from different resources or for various applications. This includes seawater desalination or ion removal for makeu p water for boilers. In all cases fouling restricts membrane performance. I n this work reverse osmosis membranes were fouled with water. Chemical clea ning of the RO membranes using acid, alkaline, surfactant and detergent sol utions has been discussed. Cleaning efficiency depends on the type of the c leaning agent and its concentration. It has been shown that the efficiency increases with increasing the concentration of the cleaning agent. The conc entration that provides the highest cleaning efficiency can be considered a s the optimum concentration. This depends on the type of the cleaning agent . Operating conditions such as crossflow velocity, turbulence in the vicini ty of the membrane surface, temperature, pH and cleaning time also play a r ole in the cleaning process. Optimum membrane cleaning requires in depth un derstanding of the interactions between the foulants and the membrane as we ll as the effect of the cleaning procedure on deposit removal and membrane performance. In this paper the mechanism of deposit removal is also investi gated.