Pressure retarded osmosis (PRO) is an osmotically-driven membrane process and it has attracted increasing interest for extracting the renewable salinity-gradient energy. In a PRO process, the water transports from a less concentrated feed solution (FS) across the membrane to a more concentrated draw solution (DS). Meanwhile, the solute in the DS reversely diffuses into the FS. This study systematically investigated the reverse solute diffusion (RSD) on the performance of PRO. Several types of commercial osmotic membranes provided by HTI were tested in PRO to evaluate the RSD and the resulted PRO performance. In addition, a theoretical mathematical model was developed to simulate the RSD in PRO processes.
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