ABSTRACT
At the end of last year, 75 million m3 of water was being desalinated each day, about twothird of which was treated using reverse osmosis (RO) and most of the remainder using thermal approaches (primarily multistage ash and multiple-effect distillation) [1]. Hidden among that daily water production is 75,000 m3 of water being treated with a new class of RO membranes, one where improvements to the separation layer had been made by leveraging recent developments in nanotechnology to improve its baseline performance metrics (i.e., water and salt transport rate and surface properties relating to fouling). In these new membranes, the traditional separation layer, rst developed in the late 1970s by North Star Research [2] and commercialized at Filmtec [3], is replaced with a blend of an interfacial formed polymer phase and nanomaterial, referred to as a thin lm nanocomposite (TFN) RO membrane.
