Sea Water Desalination

The access to water sources is an important issue where there is poor availability of well and surface water. This is particularly true in desert areas or wherever the possibility of desalinating sea water could be an advantage because of the difficulties of drilling deep wells or due to the extremely poor quality of the surface water.The technologies employed by BONO Artes in the desalination of sea water are based on membrane processes. In particular the heart of the process scheme is a Reverse Osmosis unit where saline water is pumped in cross flow on the elements with enough pressure to overcome the high osmotic pressure and enable a satisfactory recovery factor.Energy saving solutions are implemented with high-rejection energy saving permeators and with the use of energy recovery device enabling the energy of the high pressure concentrate to be transferred to the incoming feed water thus reducing the required power per unit of desalinated water.Key issues in the treatment of sea water are the filtration and debacterisation of the incoming water.Filtration could be performed again with membrane technologies (ultrafiltration, microfiltration) or with pressure-type media filters.