Fujairah plant

A hybrid MSF and RO plant is in use at the 454,000 m /d Fujairah plant in the United Arab Emirates. The two systems operate in parallel, with the overall water production split 62.5% MSF and 37.5% RO [3]. The main advantage of this design is operations flexibility while MSF plants are relatively flexible with changes of 25% production capacity possible, RO plants can be adjusted by as httle as 5% production increments because of the modular design. Another advantage is that the distilled water with very low TDS is blended with the RO permeate to supply desahnated water with TDS in the range of 75—120 mg/1. 

The first pass of the Fujairah plant consists of 17 duty and 1 standby RO trains using standard rejection SWRO membranes producing permeate of TDS concentration of 400— 500 mg/L. The overall recovery of the first-pass SWRO system is 43%. The second pass has 8 BWRO trains with a total recovery rate of 90%. The second-pass BWRO trains have two stages and treat approximately 80% of the first-pass permeate to TDS concentration of 10-20 mg/L. The rest (i.e., 20%) of the first-pass permeate is blended with the second-pass permeate to produce finished water of TDS concentration of less than 120 mg/L. The concentrate produced by the second-pass RO system has salinity lower than that of the source seawater and is recycled to the feed of the first-pass RO system... 

An example of a full-scale two-pass, two-stage RO system application is the 170,500-m /day Fujairah seawater desalination plant (Rovel, 2003). A general treatment process schematic of this plant is depicted on Figure 3.10. The plant uses Gulf of Oman, Indian Ocean, seawater (see Table 3.2 for water quality characteristics). 

Figure 3.10 Fujairah seawater desalination plant schematic. (From Rovel, 2003.)...

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