Forward osmosis for resource recovery from wastewater
Supervisors: Dr Yongqiang Liu & Prof Sonia Heaven
Research Group: Water and Environmental Engineering Group
I’m originally from Winchester and studied BEng Civil Engineering at Surrey and then an MSc in Water and Environmental Engineering. I did a placement year on a construction site during my BEng and became more interested in water treatment and environmental engineering. I wanted to do this project to focus more towards resource recovery technologies and scaling up membrane technologies for use in municipal wastewater treatment.
Project Funders: University Studentship
Project details:
The project focuses on forward osmosis technologies as a method of resource recovery in wastewater streams. Forward osmosis (FO) membrane filtration driven by osmotic pressure has attracted intense attention recently because of its potential for wastewater pre-concentration to allow direct use of the above-mentioned technologies for simultaneous water purification and resource recovery. Thus, a promising prospect of forward osmosis filtration as a key unit to design next-generation wastewater treatment plants can be expected due to its smaller footprint, more flexible operation, lower membrane fouling propensity and lower energy consumption if the draw solution is well selected and the process is well designed.