A universal transportation model for reverse osmosis systems

Abstract

This paper presents a new transport model for reverse osmosis (RO) systems, which combines irreversible thermodynamics, together with solution-diffusion theory. The simplifications adopted by the classical theory for solution-diffusion mechanisms have been found to be quite lacking when it comes to predicting the separation of multicomponent mixtures. The presented model accounts for multicomponent computations through the application of thermodynamic property models, as a means to predict the various interactions amongst the species that are present in solution. The developed transport model is relatively easy to implement, and can be utilized alongside existing equipment and thermodynamic property models. The applicability of the model presented in this paper has been tested on three different case studies, including a case that investigates single component behavior and a case that investigates multicomponent behavior The proposed model shows very good agreement with experimental results.