Integrated membrane operations for seawater desalination Original Research Article

Reverse osmosis is widely applied to water desalination because of the relatively low cost of the process. Besides the well defined role that this technology plays in the desalination scenario, in the last years, from all over the world, demand for lower costs and higher quality of water has been advanced. Integrated membrane processes represent an attractive opportunity because of the synergic effects that can be reached, the simplicity of these units, and the possibility of advanced levels of automatisation and remote control. Moreover, the integration of different membrane units represents an interesting way for reaching the process intensification goals due to the possibility of overcoming the limits of the single units and, thus, to improve the performance of the overall operation.