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Equipment
Sales and Service
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Water treatment equipment and
systems for... high purity
...water and used process water.
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High
purity water and used process waste water
* Storage
tanks, pumps, valves
* Process
controls and instrumentationIon
Exchange vs. Membrane Processes
The remarkable market penetration of RO
technology in the front end of water systems
provides an instructive recent example of the
widespread replacement of Ion Exchange unit
operations by more efficient, continuous membrane
processes. Early attempts to introduce RO for
industrial use met with reliability and
performance problems, mainly associated with the
high pressures required to achieve reasonable
fluxes, limited membrane life, poor pretreatment
selection and the lack of operating experience
and guidelines.
Following this rather
problematic initial introduction, viable RO
technology, based on a new generation of
membranes and a better understanding of operating
requirements, was eventually introduced in the
1980's. The commercial introduction of RO then
proceeded rapidly, so that today most new, and
many retrofit water systems employ RO instead of
the traditional IX systems. Furthermore, by using
specific newly-developed membranes, RO technology
has been successfully applied in other areas,
including large scale desalination. Thus, when
technical performance and cost issues related to
RO were satisfactorily resolved, its widespread
introduction took place in a remarkably short
time.
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