Pretreatment Performance Evaluation of the Seawater Desalination Plant of Beni Saf BWC

Abstract

The BENI SAF Seawater Desalination Plant is one of the largest projects undertaken by the Algerian state for supplying drinking water, with a capacity of 200,000 m3 per day. The plant uses the Reverse Osmosis technique as a desalination process. The performance of such systems requires the production of pretreated, good-quality feed water. Moreover, a number of large-scale experiments have shown that pretreatment of seawater before reverse osmosis (RO) desalination is key to retard fouling in osmosis membranes. This work aims to study the performance of the pretreatment selected by the BENI SAF Desalination Plant. To achieve this, we determined the physico-chemical and bacteriological parameters of the raw seawater used by the Plant. Variation of SDI, which is a key parameter in controlling fouling potential, was monitored during the year 2019. The pretreatment performance was investigated by monitoring the efficiency of each stage of the pretreatment process. The results obtained show the efficiency of the pretreatment adopted by this desalination plant.