Author: Dr. Wafa Ali Saleh SuwailehPublisher: Ashok Yakkaldevi
ISBN: 1716374774
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 202
Book Description
1.1 Background Water–stress is becoming one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. The fast growth of population, tourism, and agriculture development in the world has resulted in a great demand for access to clean water [3]. Most of the developing regions of the world are still suffering from water scarcity. The problem of water shortage is being extended to other nations of the world. The lack of access to safe drinking water poses significant problems globally. Fresh water is not available for around 1.2 billion people worldwide while around 2.6 billion may obtain limited or unsafe water. This may be the result of climate change with extreme industrial and agriculture activities. It was assumed that by 2025, two thirds of people around the world will be living in water-stressed countries [4]. Thus, the requirement of potable water to sustain human life in the world will rise from 4500 billion m3 to 6900 billion m3 by 2030 which goes beyond the accessible water resources [5]. Therefore, we need to meet and sustain these growing demands as soon as possible. A promising technology to meet the demand of fresh water is water desalination using membrane technology. A recent study reported that the daily production of desalinated water was up to 25 million m3 globally [6, 7]. Water desalination was developed to remove salts and other contaminants from seawater, brackish water and produced water to acquire drinking water [8]. Singh et al. [9] stated that since 1995 membrane filtration has been effective in removing microbiological species such as Giardia and Cryptosporidium. It has also been reported that membrane-based desalination provides 63.7% drinking water while thermal desalination method provides almost half of it, about 34.2% globally [10]. For instance, micro-filtration and ultrafiltration membranes can reject particles much smaller than 1 micron such as proteins, oil droplets, bacteria, etc. In contrast, Nano filtration and reverse osmosis can separate particles in the range of 1/100th to 1/1000th of a micrometre, such as aqueous salts, sugars, and amino acids [11]. Among the membrane desalination technologies, reverse osmosis (RO) is being actively used in most countries due to their significant properties and ease of obtaining drinking water.