Small-scale membrane-based desalinators-developing a viable concept for sustainable arsenic removal from groundwater

摘要

Arsenic poisoning in drinking water is a health issue in many countries worldwide including Bangladesh, India, Argentina, China and Vietnam. In areas where the drinking water supply contains unsafe levels of arsenic, technologies to remove arsenic are of prime importance. Many technologies have been developed for the removal of arsenic. Among those, Reverse Osmosis (RO) and NanoFiltration (NF) are very promising techniques because they have the advantage of removing dissolved arsenic along with other dissolved and particulate compounds. So far, however, this kind of membrane filtration has needed bulky and sophisticated units, which are not suitable for application in the rural areas of developing and newly industrializing countries. Therefore, the purpose of this work was to develop and test a simple and viable concept for membrane based arsenic removal in rural areas of developing countries. For this purpose, laboratory work was done at Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences and pilot-scale experiments were conducted in rural India.