First Phase

For the last two weeks, we have split up into our 3 groups (as mentioned earlier):

Design (Farhana):

On 8 May 2009, I had met with the members from other team to discuss on the design of the multistage RO/NF system for this project. I was not sure what I was supposed to do at first as I did not attend the briefing held on 24 April 2009 (1^st week). I knew that the design team has to design a 3 stage system with an ultimate aim to reduce the operating cost and the fixed capital through the modification of the conventional process.

Before this meeting, the design team leader had asked me to come up with my own design PFD with the necessary instruments in the design. While designing it, I missed out an important consideration in mind which is my design should be having different feed location because my group task is to find the optimum feed location using brackish water. On that day itself, I had to redesign my design. The design team, after much discussion, had come with the final design. We had shown Mr. Adrian and Ms. Ng the final design and they had given us their feedbacks. The feedback they give is that we should consider pressure required to the RO unit, putting the flow indicator on the low pressure side and they also shows us some configurations that we should have. There are quite a lot of amendments to be made. So the following day, the team had met up again to make changes with the design.

 

On 15 May 2009, the design team had presented the finalized design of the RO/NF system to Ms. Ng, one of the supervisors of the project, Dr. Adrian and Dr. Chong  from NTU. They commented that our design was too complicated as the instruments/equipments were not tagged plus there were missing streams or streams that had no purpose. Hence, Ms. Claire had asked the team to focus on three configurations first before we add our own configurations as well in the design. So currently, the design team is focusing on these three configurations. Here is the current design:

Design Team's P&ID

Membrane Characterisation (Cheryl):

My team met on 8 May 2009 with the intention of running one of the membrane pilot plants that we have in W314. However, the plant was not ready to run die to some technical diffuculties. Thus, we decided to make use of the time to design the new membrane characterisation plant's P&ID, as well as to come up with the procedures for it.

However, when we presented our proposal to Ms. Ng, Dr. Adrian and Dr. Chong on 15 May, they mentioned that we were missing some safety relief vales in our design, as well as other minor factors. In addition, the membrane modules and pumps provided by the vendor was quite costly, so we might need to come up with alternatives by the next meeting next Friday. Meanwhile, we have improved our design to this:

Modelling (Wei Lu):

Our group was supposed to meet up on 6th May to discuss. However, due to some problems, we did not hold the meeting. Hence, we went home and tried on the case studies given to us.

The next meeting was on 15th May. Our modeling group presented on the calculations we did and due to the misleading configuration, we had to redo everything. We tried to use the new design from the design group and state assumptions. After which, we started to find the unknown values (for the recovery and rejections) using the assumptions made. We all tried out and are still trying out to get the values correct if possible.