While mechanical vapor compression is typically applied for the concentration of brine, new approaches that are less costly and less energy intensive are needed to facilitate minimal and zero liquid discharge. Several variations of reverse osmosis for high-salinity desalination and increasing recovery rates beyond the pressure limitation of conventional RO have been proposed in the literature. The promise of these enhanced RO approaches entails a reduction in energy consumption when compared with thermal desalination methods. In this paper, low-salt rejection reverse osmosis (LSRRO), cascading osmotically mediated reverse osmosis (COMRO), and osmotically assisted reverse osmosis (OARO) were comparatively assessed via module-scale, cost optimization models to gain an accurate perspective of the performance differences between each of these configurations. We quantified the optimal levelized cost of water (LCOW) of each technology for the case of desalinating feedwater at 70 g/L at 75% recovery, which would result in a brine concentration near 250 g/L, a level that allows further treatment with crystallizers. For baseline scenarios, LCOW results for LSRRO, COMRO, and OARO were 6.63, 7.90, and 5.14 $/m³ of product water, respectively, while the corresponding specific energy consumption (SEC) values were 28.9, 12.8, and 10.3 kWh/m³. A sensitivity analysis is also presented.

虽然通常采用机械蒸汽压缩法来浓缩盐水，但仍需要成本更低，能耗更低的新方法，以实现最少的零液体排放。在文献中已经提出了用于高盐度脱盐的反渗透的几种变型，以及提高回收率的方法，这些都超过了常规反渗透的压力极限。与热脱盐方法相比，这些增强型反渗透方法的前景是降低能耗。本文通过模块规模对低盐排斥反渗透（LSRRO），级联渗透介导的反渗透（COMRO）和渗透辅助反渗透（OARO）进行了比较评估，成本优化模型，以准确了解每个配置之间的性能差异。对于定量为70 g / L，回收率为75％的给水淡化的情况，我们量化了每种技术的最佳水平均成本（LCOW），这将导致盐水浓度接近250 g / L，该水平允许进一步进行盐水处理。结晶器。对于基准方案，LSRRO，COMRO和OARO的LCOW结果分别为6.63、7.90和5.14 $ / m³个产品水，而相应的单位能耗（SEC）值分别为28.9、12.8和10.3 kWh / m ³。还介绍了灵敏度分析。