ABSTRACT
The typical techniques for eliminating impurities from water sources include settling and granular media filtration, sand filters, coagulation and flocculation, while desalination is traditionally carried out using energy-consuming distillation. However, in recent decades, membrane-based techniques have attracted much attention. They are now widely accepted as viable alternatives to conventional processes. Membrane systems offer considerable advantages, such as high efficiency of impurities removal, the ability to select the class of contaminants to be removed (from algae and bacteria to monovalent and divalent salts), the obviation of the need for additional chemicals to achieve separation, a small footprint and ease of automation and scaling up, coupled with reduced energy consumption.
