Utilizing Membrane and Other Treatment Technologies to Achieve Sustainable Water Management Schemes for Industrial Facilities Located in Arid, Water Scarce Regions

Alternative approaches were developed and costed to treat and recover RO reject generated from high purity water production within an electronics facility located in the southwestern US, where reject disposal to a surface water body or wastewater treatment plant would exceed allowable total dissolved solids (TDS) limits. Technologies utilized in the development of alternatives included those that employed a combination of precipitative softening using lime, caustic soda and soda ash implemented using pellet and conventional high-rate solids contact reactors and tubular microfiltration; granular media and membrane filtration; brackish and seawater RO using conventional and special configurations (e.g., HERO™, OPUS™, and disc tube); followed by mechanical-driven evaporation and crystallization. This arrangement was compared with an approach that used only evaporation and crystallization. The alternatives analysis revealed that the all-distillation alternative, although higher in capital cost, was estimated to have lower life cycle cost along with several non-cost benefits.