Method for treatment and reuse of used water streams

摘要

Methods for recovering energy and water from at least one energy-rich process water stream are provided. The methods optionally incorporate the use of filtration, reverse osmosis, ion exchange, water softening, forward osmosis, and membrane distillation. The methods can be used to recover energy and water from blowdown or condensate from a water-containing industrial process, which in certain embodiments may be a boiler system.

主权项

1. A method for improving efficiency of a water-containing industrial process, the method comprising:
feeding energy-rich process water or energy-rich process water filtrate formed by filtering energy-rich process water to a membrane distillation unit, thereby creating a membrane distillate and an energy-rich aqueous liquid; purifying the energy-rich aqueous liquid using a salinated liquid as a draw stream in a forward osmosis unit, thereby creating a diluted stream; preliminarily purifying a stream comprising at least one of the energy-rich aqueous liquid and the diluted stream using a technique selected from the group consisting of: reverse osmosis, ion exchange, water softening, and combinations thereof, thereby creating purified water; feeding the purified water and the membrane distillate into at least one heated thermal industrial water system.