ABSTRACT
For inland desalination plants, managing and discarding produced brine leftover can involve significant operating costs. Ion exchange may be used as a pretreatment method to selectively remove and replace sulfate by chloride to eradicate any threat of fouling. The reverse osmosis (RO) process can then be operated at higher recoveries without any threat of sulfate scaling because of the removal of sulfate by the ion exchange column. The most common method of desalination in the United States is RO. During normal RO operation, the concentration of solution at the surface of the membrane is several times more concentrated than the bulk solution because of the phenomenon of concentration polarization. There are two main parameters that can be chosen for a given anion exchange resin: the composition of the matrix and the functional group of the resin. All resins were strong base but varied in resin matrix or functional group. A properly designed hybrid ion exchange–RO system can achieve higher recoveries.
