The economic impact of fouling in spiral wound membranes is not yet well explored. There has been an established assumption that the cost of fouling in membrane processes is significant, but this hypothesis has not been thoroughly evaluated. We conducted an economic analysis on seven full-scale installations, four nanofiltration (NF) and three reverse osmosis (RO), to estimate the cost of fouling in industrial plants. The cost of fouling was calculated in detail, including costs of increase in feed channel pressure drop, water permeability reduction, early membrane replacement, and extensive cleaning-in-place (CIP). The estimated cost of fouling was expressed as a fraction of operational expenses (OPEX) for each plant and the major cost factors in fouling and CIP costs were identified. The selected NF plants were fed with anoxic ground water, while the feed water to RO plants was either surface water or municipal wastewater effluent. All the NF plants produce drinking water, while the RO plants produce demineralized water for industrial applications. We found that the cost of fouling in the RO plants was around 24% of OPEX, while the fouling related costs in NF cases was only around 11% due to the low biofouling potential of the anoxic ground water. The major factor in the cost of fouling is the early membrane replacement cost, followed by additional energy and with only a minor contribution from the cleaning costs. The down-time cost (caused by the interruption of water production during a CIP event) can be the major CIP cost factor for the plants with frequent cleaning events, while the cost of chemicals dominates in the plants with non-frequent CIP. In case of manual cleaning-in-place, the cost of fouling is increased by around 2% for the RO plants with frequent CIP. The manual execution of CIP cleaning is an attention point to reconsider, as the reviewed plants hold an automated CIP cleaning, providing membrane productivity advantages.

Chemical cleaning is vital for the optimal operation of membrane systems. Membrane chemical cleaning protocols are often developed in the laboratory flow cells (e.g., Membrane Fouling Simulator (MFS)) using synthetic feed water (nutrient excess) and short experimental time of typically days. However, full-scale Reverse Osmosis (RO) membranes are usually fed with nutrient limited feed water (due to extensive pre-treatment) and operated for a long-time of typically years. These operational differences lead to significant differences in the efficiency of chemical Cleaning-In-Place (CIP) carried out on laboratory-scale and on full-scale RO systems. Therefore, we investigated the suitability of lab-scale CIP results for full-scale applications. A lab-scale flow cell (i.e., MFSs) and two full-scale RO modules were analysed to compare CIP efficiency in terms of water flux recovery and biofouling properties (biomass content, Extracellular Polymeric Substances (EPS) composition and EPS adherence) under typical lab-scale and full-scale conditions. We observed a significant difference between the CIP efficiency in lab-scale (~50%) and full-scale (9–20%) RO membranes. Typical biomass analysis such as Total Organic Carbon (TOC) and Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) measurements did not indicate any correlation to the observed trend in the CIP efficiency in the lab-scale and full-scale RO membranes. However, the biofilms formed in the lab-scale contains different EPS than the biofilms in the full-scale RO modules. The biofilms in the lab-scale MFS have polysaccharide-rich EPS (Protein/Polysaccharide ratio = 0.5) as opposed to biofilm developed in full-scale modules which contain protein-rich EPS (Protein/Polysaccharide ratio = 2.2). Moreover, EPS analysis indicates the EPS extracted from full-scale biofilms have a higher affinity and rigidity to the membrane surface compared to EPS from lab-scale biofilm. Thus, we propose that CIP protocols should be optimized in long-term experiments using the realistic feed water.