A pilot study of ultrafiltration pretreatment for seawater reverse osmosis desalination in Bohai Bay

The paper proves the feasibility of using the ultrafiltration combined with reverse osmosis to desalt sea water in Bohai Bay over four-month pilot running. The results show that the influent quality is not influenced by the UF effluent quality and the optimum operational parameters are the flux 62.5 L/m² h, the quality of UF permeate was excellent, with turbidity measured below 0.13 NTU and 94% of the SDI₁₅ below 3.0. The ultrafiltration membrane could feed water into the reverse osmosis systems sequentially and steadily, and the salt rejection of reverse osmosis membrane was above 99.1% and stable during the experimental time. Therefore, this method can be used to provide clean materials for multipurpose development of the seawater due to being simple process and low-cost investiment.