Fouling control and modeling in reverse osmosis for seawater desalination: A review

Abstract

The development of the antifouling Reverse Osmosis (RO) membranes requires modeling and simulation as an essential tool alongside the progress of RO membrane technologies. After discussing the most recent knowledge on fouling, cleaning procedures, and pretreatment technologies, this review highlights the recent advances in RO membranes technology, together with macroscale and microscale modeling that could lead the full development of antifouling RO membrane. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) emerges as a promising modeling tool that could fully capture all mechanisms/phenomena involved in RO and fouling. For the successful simulation of fouling coupled to RO process, the development of models achieving a trade-off between computational cost and accuracy requirements that can be applied to all fouling types requires further theoretical development in the future.