PL EN
Air sparging as a strategy for optimizing reverse osmosis membrane
 
More details
Hide details
1
Department of Chemical Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Baghdad, Baghdad, Iraq
 
 
Corresponding author
Faaiz Hussain Saleh   

Department of Chemical Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Baghdad, Baghdad, Iraq
 
 
J. Ecol. Eng. 2025; 26(3):99-107
 
KEYWORDS
TOPICS
ABSTRACT
This study aims to enhance the performance of reverse osmosis (RO), a significant membrane technology for water desalination, by improving its permeation flux and rejection of NaCl, which is considered a powerful tool for fouling control. The air sparging approach has been implemented and examined at different air flow rates to achieve this. RO system with air sparging technique has been studied at various operating conditions such as air flow rate range from 1-3 L/min, feed concentration (2000 and 3000 ppm), water flow rate (1 and 1.3 L/min), temperature (20 and 32o C), and applied pressure (4 and 5 bar). The result confirmed a significant improvement in permeate flux and rejection when the air is injected into the RO system. It revealed that increasing the air flow rate increased the flux, reaching a maximum value at an air flow rate of 1.8 L/min, after that, it started to decline. Additionally, increasing the water flow rate, pressure, and temperature increased the permeate flux. On the other hand, increased feed concentrations negatively impacted the permeate flux. The maximum flux and rejection obtained was 10.76 L/hr.m2 and 96.17% at 5 bar, 3000 ppm, 1 L/min water flow rate, and T = 32±1 ℃. Moreover, the value of the injection factor is equal to 0.64, indicating that the flow pattern was the slug flow, which represented a highly effective flow regime.
Journals System - logo
Scroll to top