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Description
Desalination of brackish groundwater using Forward Osmosis technology is an emerging field of research. One of its application, Fertilizer Drawn Forward Osmosis (FDFO), represents a potential alternative water supply for irrigation. Adapting this technique, under the framework of the Water-Energy-Food “WEF” nexus perspective, is promising to overcome water scarcity challenges while preventing any trade-off between sustainability aspects. FDFO desalination can make irrigation water available at comparatively lower energy than the current desalination technologies. Being a low energy technology, FDFO can be operated using renewable energy, which makes it suitable for inland and remote applications and represent a great example of interlinkage between SDGs such as SDGs 2, 6 and 7.
This research investigates the application of FDFO technique and its potential use in Egypt under the Framework of the Water-Energy-Food Nexus. In this work, feed solution used is brackish groundwater extracted from a well in Sinai, Egypt. Two sets of experiments have been conducted. The objective of having two separate scenarios is to provide informative assessment useful for the two main agriculture techniques, the conventional soil-based and hydroponics. The first set examined three commonly used fertilizers in Egypt: Urea, Di-Ammonium Phosphate and Potassium Nitrate to compare between their performances. The second set examined standard hydroponic recipe, which is a mixture of nutrients, as a draw solution to fertilize crops in hydroponics systems.
The nutrients mixture performance was tested and compared to that of the individual components at the same concentrations. Regarding the first set, Di- Ammonium Phosphate resulted in the best performance as draw solute among the three tested draw solutes, where it exhibited a significant water flux equivalent to 13.8 LMH, a feed ions rejection reaching 98% and acceptable concentrations of draw solute ions in the final product water. For the Second set, The Hydroponics nutrients mixture exhibited better performance as draw solution compared to its individual macro-components. The use of the nutrient mixture as draw solute resulted in a flux of 11.7 LMH, 95% feed ions rejection compared to 9.2 LMH, 91%, and 10.03 LMH, 93% for its individual components. Mixing nutrients boosted the osmotic pressure and enhanced the driving force for fresh water permeation.
