Reverse osmosis pilot plant to produce drinking water in Chanduy community of Santa Elena province-Ecuador

Abstract

Desalination using reverse osmosis (RO) systems is one of the water technologies introduced to address freshwater scarcity in arid and semi-arid regions through the production of water with characteristics for human consumption. The Zapotal River Basin located in Santa Elena, Ecuador, is a semi-arid area, where water demand is greater than available water sources. The objective of this research is to design a decentralized RO system to production of water for consumption purposes, in terms of low salinity content. Therefore, a water sampling campaign was carried out in the study area to identify the communities with the greatest need for water desalination. Additionally, physicochemical water parameters and the analysis of major ions in surface and groundwater samples were measured to design a RO desalination system. An open-source software named “WAVE” was used to determine the removal efficiencies and energy consumption. Synthetic water solutions using NaCl electrical conductivity (EC) concentrations ranging from 3000 to 24000 μS/cm were used as feed water for the RO technology to simulate the measured EC of the study area. The experimental removal efficiency results were 95.98 and 99.52%, with an energy consumption of 3.90-4.58 kWh/m3. The energy consumption was optimized by increasing the number of membranes in the RO plant simulation. Finally, the importance of this study lies in designing and proposing a brackish water treatment alternative to assure the availability of water for human consumption and its sustainable management, reaffirming what is stated in SDG 6.