WATER PURIFICATION-DESALINATION WITH MEMBRANE TECHNOLOGY SUPPLIED WITH RENEWABLE ENERGY

摘要

Chronic water shortages, water pollution and growing economies all over the word drive many Countries to consider water purification and desalination as a solution to their water supply problems. Membrane separation technologies offer a large spectrum of applications for water purification, particularly in order to maximise the purified water recovery. Technologies such as microfiltration (MF), ultrafiltration (UF), nanofiltration (NF) and reverse osmosis (RO) are largely applied all over the world for wastewaters purification and for seawater potabilization. The renewable energy sources (RES), such as photovoltaic (PV) and wind turbine (WT) are important to drive membrane technology toward recovery of purified water from polluted fresh water sources or from brackish and seawater. The energy required for water purification depends on the chemical composition of feed water and, consequently on the purification technologies suitable to reach the final water specification. For example the potabilization of freshwater polluted from pathogen us bacteria can be obtained with MF-UF that requires low energy consumption (1.2 kWh/m{sup}3). On the contrary, the potabilization of seawater requires a devoted plant (pre-treatment section, RO unit, refining section) with energy consumption in the range of 3-15 kWh/m{sup}3.