wcm.02.2025.339.345

Fouling of reverse osmosis (RO) membranes is one of the utmost significant issues that membrane manufacturers, the scientific community, and industry experts must address. The effects of this unavoidable phenomenon have a negative impact on the desalination system’s performance. There are little published researches on fouling propensity on membranes from real operating desalination plants, which considered dynamic fouling in RO process. Indeed, these studies would help the plant operator to estimate the accurate time of membrane cleaning or replacing. For a practical application, this research introduces the brackish water RO system desalination plant of Arab Potash Company (APC) as a case study to investigate the fouling propensity in the membranes and instruct the operators towards the accurate time of membrane cleaning or replacement. The RO desalination plant is designed as a medium-sized (1200 m3 /day), multistage, two passes. To achieve this investigation, a previous original RO mathematical model equations produced by the same author has involved dynamic fouling analysis. Using a simulation-based model via Matlab, the consequences of membrane fouling accumulation for three continuous operational years on the performance indicators variations with time are studied. The simulation findings show that it is important to carry out an overall membrane cleaning within 92 continuous operational days as a consequence to a reduction of the water productivity by 10%. However, it is essential to replace the membranes within 2.99 operational years due to a reduction in water productivity by 25%, which deduces an increase of 17.5% in the specific energy consumption.