Author(s)

Yatnanta Padma Devia^1,2*, Tsuyoshi Imai¹, Takaya Higuchi¹, Ariyo Kanno³, Koichi Yamamoto³, Masahiko Sekine³, Tuan Van Le⁴

¹Division of Environmental Science and Engineering, Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Yamaguchi University, Ube-shi, Japan.
²Department of Civil Engineering, Brawijaya University, Malang, Indonesia.
³Division of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Yamaguchi University, Ube-shi, Japan.
⁴Department of Environmental Science, Hue University of Science, Hue City, Vietnam.

Wastewater may contain high levels of the nutrients: nitrogen and phosphorus. Excessive release of nutrients to the environment can cause severe environmental problem such as eutrophication leading to algal blooms, oxygen deficiency, and fish kills. The forward osmosis (FO) could be a choice of treatment. FO process presents the results of using four kinds of variation in concentration of magnesium chloride (MgCl₂) as draw solution and the two kinds of commercial membranes for nutrient rejection in the same cross flow velocity at 0.25 m/s and temperature at 25°C. Nutrients consisting of nitrogen (nitrite, nitrate, and ammonium) and phosphorus (phosphate) in feed solution were successfully rejected with an efficiency of mostly more 95%. The water flux in membrane HTI-NW achieved lower 7.55 - 9.61 L/m²·hr than in membrane HTI-ES that exceeds until 13.58 - 15.10 L/m²·hr. The reverse solute in membrane HTI-NW is seemly constant along all concentration of DS MgCl₂ that the chloride diffusion is slightly higher than magnesium. In membrane HTI-ES, the reverse solute of chloride was almost three times than that of magnesium. The concentration of MgCl₂ plays a significant role in rejecting nutrients by the Donnan’s potential and the diffusion constant in low and high concentration of DS, respectively.

Forward Osmosis, Magnesium Chloride, Nutrient

Devia, Y. , Imai, T. , Higuchi, T. , Kanno, A. , Yamamoto, K. , Sekine, M. and Le, T. (2015) Potential of Magnesium Chloride for Nutrient Rejection in Forward Osmosis. Journal of Water Resource and Protection, 7, 730-740. doi: 10.4236/jwarp.2015.79060.