EXPERIMENTAL DATA ANALYSIS FOR A REVERSE OSMOSIS DESALINATION PLANT

Water scarcity is slowly becoming a threat to the normal livelihoods of people as the human population continues to increase. Affordable options of sourcing potable water are needed, especially in Africa where purification of water is generally expensive. Reverse osmosis (RO) desalination has proven to be one of the most preferred and applied techniques in the desalination of water due to its production of good permeate water quality at low cost compared to other desalination techniques. Research and development for the design and optimization of this process to come up with optimum design parameters has been ongoing. This article summarizes the data extracted from experiments done on one of the major desalination plants in Cape Town, South Africa. The data was collected and statistically analyzed using Microsoft Excel and different relationships of parameters like feed and permeate total dissolved salts (TDS), temperature, pressure, energy and pH were plotted.