1. Title, Journal and Authors
Title: Forward osmosis: Where are we now
Journal: Desalination
Authors: Devin L. Shaffer1, Jay R. Werber1, Humberto Jaramillo, Shihong Lin, Menachem Elimelech*
Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520-8286, USA
2. Summary
This paper study about the FO process. Verify the FO process with some points of view, discusses the practical efficiency of the FO process. People simply think that the FO process is low energy process because we can easily filter the water with osmosis. But actually we need high energy to separate the draw solute from the water in FO process. So to optimize the FO process, finding the optimal draw solution that is easily separated from the solution is the master key. And as there is no perfect draw solute that can highly easy to separate from solution, FO process is not effective for simply producing clean water. However FO process has some good points at fouling problem. The membrane fouling is much less produced than reverse osmosis process and it is highly reversible.
In conclusion, FO process is not an effective process itself for producing clean water. But the linkage between FO process and RO process by suggesting that FO process can be effectively used for pre-treatment of high concentration solution which can not be used as feed water directly or to reduce the concentration of sea water to make osmotic pressure smaller in RO process with using the treated sewer as feed water. Plus FO process can be effectively used to make agricultural water.
3. Application to research
This study can be applied to improve FO-RO hybrid process. We can understand about weak point of FO process, and ways to apply it.
4. Contact
Yeon Jun Park / undergrduate
Environmental Systems Engineering Lab.
School of Environmental Science and Engineering
Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology
216 Cheomdan-gwagiro, Bukgu, Gwangju 500-712 Korea
Tel: +82-62-715-2461
E-mail: qpyj@gist.ac.kr