Control and monitoring of MSF-RO hybrid desalination process

The growing demand for making the seawater desalination process more and more cost effective call for the two leading desalination technologies namely Multi-Stage Flash brine recirculation (MSF-BR) and Reverse Osmosis (RO) to be hybridized at various levels to complement each other. This paper demonstrates development of supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) based process control and instrumentation of the hybridized system. The hybridized system focuses on the use of MSF reject cooling seawater to feed reverse osmosis unit. FactoryTalk View Site Edition (SE), a real time platform for industrial automation by Rockwell Automation, is used for development and simulation of entire process. The entire process control and monitoring take place through human machine interface (HMI).