Comparison analysis of different technologies for the removal of boron from seawater: A review

Abstract

Boron overabundance in drinking and irrigation water is a severe environment and health issues because it is toxic to various crops and induces many human and animals diseases with long-term exposition. Desalinated seawater from reverses osmosis (RO) plant, which is the most widely used technology in this field, often contains high boron concentration. Hence, a costly second pass RO process is required which makes most of the scientists into the obligation to find simple, sustainable and efficient alternatives in terms of quality and cost to comply with the WHO standards (2.4 mg L-1). In this trend, the present review aims to give an analysis of different existing processes for boron removal from seawater, including electrocoagulation, sorption processes encountered adsorption and ion exchange resins, and other membrane processes like electrodialysis, electro ionization, membrane distillation and adsorption membrane filtration. The performances of these processes are compared and their pros and cons are discussed. The fundamentals of each technique, the operating parameters effects and findings are also reported. Electrocoagulation as a pretreatment prior to reverse osmosis as a hybrid system seems to be more suitable and promising to mitigate boron from seawater due to its feasibility, sustainability and cheapness. Future perspectives for this hybrid system are discussed. This review also includes the economical assessment for each method. The focus of this paper is thus to provide updated information deboronation processes and exhibit the development of its guidance.