Performance evaluation of Forward Osmosis - Reverse Osmosis hybrid system for treatment of produced water from oil production fields

As the population is rapidly growing, developing low-energy water treatment techniques for unconventional sources is crucial to sustain water and energy resources and meet increasing water demand. Although most of the installed water treatment plant are currently using RO techniques to produce clean water, reverse osmosis still remains an energy-intensive process (Munirasu et al. 2016). Furthermore, membrane fouling decreases RO performance by posing periodic plant downtime and increases maintenance cost due to use of cleaning chemicals (Chekli et al. 2016). Hence, novel low-cost treatment technologies that could surmount these issues will play a significant role in sustaining the water and energy sources. Recently, forward osmosis is gaining interest as a novel low-cost water treatment technology due to their significantly lower fouling potential and energy consumption compared to the conventional pressuredriven membranes. However, one of the major obstacles that barricades the common industrial use of FO process is the extraction of clean water from the diluted draw solution (Kim et al. 2018), which a hybrid system coupling RO to the FO membrane could predictably overcome. This study investigated the optimizing of the FO-RO hybrid process performances in treatment of produced water (PW) from oil production fields.