DESIGN OF A LAB-SCALE FORWARD OSMOSIS DESALINATION CELL FOR CONCENTRATION POLARIZATION MITIGATION TESTING
Open Access
- Author:
- Gockowski, Luke Fabrice
- Millennium Scholars Program:
- Mechanical Engineering (M E)
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisor:
- Dr. Tak Sing Wong, Thesis Supervisor
Dr. Pak King Wong, Advisor - Keywords:
- forward osmosis
design - Abstract:
- Over forty percent of the global population lives in regions incapable of meeting human and ecological water demand; an issue only to be exacerbated by a projected annual global population increase of over 80 million. In the face of this crisis global water desalination capacities have leapt from an estimated 326 cubic meters of water produced per day in 1945 [5] to an estimated 86.8 million cubic meters produced per day in 2015 [6]. Though a wide range of mature desalination technologies are currently commercially available, membrane desalination technologies are rapidly becoming popular for their superior energetics (i.e. lower specific energy consumption (kWh/m3) [10] and in turn, lower monetary costs. Forward osmosis (FO) is one membrane desalination technology that has received little commercial attention due to challenges such as scaling, specific energy cost, and concentration polarization. Addressing the latter, prior studies focus primarily on the significance of membrane and draw solute parameters [12, 13, 14]: (1) membrane orientation, (2) magnitude of the diffusion coefficient of the draw solute, (3) structural properties of the membrane support layer, and (4) the solute resistivity and their effects on ICP. However, no existing published body of work investigates the effect of mixing in a FO cell channel on concentration polarization. Herein, the design of three lab-scale FO cells intended for such investigation are covered in-depth, as well as discussion of the effect of mixing in a FO cell channel on concentration polarization.