Municipal and Civil use

Municipal and Civil use

The major problem today is represented in the shortage of potable water throughout the world and for many countries and especially for the islands, an effective solution to this issue is the desalination of brackish and seawater using the reverse osmosis technology. Other alternatives solutions are offered where there are available water resources like lakes, rivers, dams or underground water and only mechanical filtration and chemical conditioning of the water is enough to transform it to potable water.
The groundwater high salinity is the major quality problem for potable purposes, for example high salt contents of sulphates, nitrates, chlorides, sodium, fluoride, arsenic, boron make the water non drinking to humans, unsuitable for daily personal hygiene. In addition to the high water salinity, bacteria load, iron, manganese, organic material and chlorination derivative compounds, such as tetrachloroethylenes, rare but common in the groundwater resources, are also a challenge for the water treatment and their removal is indispensable for high quality drinking water production.
The membrane separation technology is used in a broad spectrum for water potabilization purposes and especially the reverse osmosis is the most common technology employed for drinking water production because of its reliability, compactness, easy installation and maintenance and low operating costs. This technology has rapidly developed over the years employing materials certified and approved by the most important health organizations as FDA and NSF and high salinity water is easily and competitively transformed into standard quality drinking water with quality parameters complying with the ones defined and declared by the World Health Organization (WHO).