Performance Analysis of a Full-Scale Desalination Plant with Reverse Osmosis Membranes for Irrigation.

Reverse osmosis (RO) is the most widely used technology for seawater desalination purposes. The long-term operating data of full-scale plants is key to analyse their performance under real conditions. The studied seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) desalination plant had a production capacity of 5000 m/d for irrigation purposes. The operating data such as conductivities flows, and pressures were collected for around 27,000 h for 4 years. The plant had sand and cartridge filters without chemical dosing in the pre-treatment stage, a RO system with one stage, 56 pressure vessels, seven RO membrane elements per pressure vessel and a Pelton turbine as energy recovery device. The operating data allowed to calculate the average water and salt permeability coefficients ( and ) of the membrane as well as the specific energy consumption () along the operating period. The calculation of the average A in long-term operation allowed to fit the parameters of three different models used to predict the mentioned parameter. The results showed a 30% decrease of parameter increase around 70%. The was between 3.75 and 4.25 kWh/m. The three models fitted quite well to the experimental data with standard deviations between 0.0011 and 0.0015.