Square-like spirals

The industry is extremely competitive, with the manufacturers producing similar products and competing mostly on price. Many incremental improvements have been made to membrane and module performance over the past 20 years, resulting in steadily decreasing water desalination costs in inflation-adjusted dollars. Some performance values taken from a paper by Furukawa are shown in Table 5.5. Since 1980, just after the introduction of the first interfacial composite membranes, the cost of spiral-wound membrane modules on a per square meter basis has decreased seven-fold. At the same time the water flux has doubled, and the salt permeability has decreased seven-fold. Taking these improvements into account, today s membranes are almost 100 times better than those of the 1980s. This type of incremental improvement is likely to continue for some time. 

---