Brackish water can be considered an important source of fresh water, via desalination, especially for arid districts. Reverse Osmosis (RO) process has been successfully used to produce fresh water from brackish water sources. However, there is still the challenge of improving the performance of multistage RO desalination plants. From the selection of the RO configurations to the selection of the appropriate type of membranes and the operating conditions at the end determines the performance of RO process in terms of recovery, salt rejection, energy consumptions and ultimately the cost of production of freshwater. Using model-based simulation, this work attempts to investigate the most suitable types of membranes for an industrial scale RO plant from a set of different membrane brands that would attain the highest-performance at lowest specific energy consumption (SEC). As a case study, we considered a multistage multi-pass medium-scale RO plant (1200 m³/day) of Arab Potash Company (APC, Jordan) which produces high quality water for the boilers after pre-treatment stage. The simulation results confirmed that employment of the Filmtec BW30LE-440 would increase water recovery by about 22% besides reducing the product salinity and SEC by about 15% and 10%, respectively compared to the existing membrane.

通过淡化，咸淡水可以被认为是重要的淡水来源，特别是在干旱地区。反渗透（RO）工艺已成功用于从微咸水源生产淡水。但是，仍然存在提高多级反渗透海水淡化厂性能的挑战。从反渗透配置的选择到合适类型的膜的选择以及最终的操作条件决定了反渗透工艺的性能，包括回收率，脱盐率，能耗以及最终的淡水生产成本。使用基于模型的仿真，这项工作试图从一组不同的膜品牌中研究最适合工业规模反渗透设备的膜类型，这些膜将在最低的比能耗（SEC）下获得最高的性能。作为案例研究，我们考虑了多级多通中型反渗透设备（1200 m阿拉伯钾肥公司（APC，约旦）的第³天/天），该产品在预处理阶段后为锅炉生产高质量的水。仿真结果证实，与现有膜相比，使用Filmtec BW30LE-440可使水的回收率提高约22％，此外，产品盐度和SEC分别降低约15％和10％。