Comparison of drinking water pollutant removal using a nanofiltration pilot plant powered by renewable energy and a conventional treatment facility

• We compare drinking water treatment systems, a NF unit and a conventional treatment. • Sustainable water quality improvement using renewable energy is demonstrated. • Membranes are more efficient than conventional treatment removing micropollutants. • Membranes reject hydrophobic compounds causing the permeate becomes more hydrophilic.

A NF plant powered by RE was tested to compare its performances with a conventional DWTP. • Results obtained from the experiments show that the use of this kind of containerized pilot plant, powered exclusively by a hybrid renewable energy system, allows treating efficiently and sustainably drinking water resources. • Although reservoir and conventionally treated water were of good quality, nanofiltration membranes improved in an important way the final water quality. Removals of metals, metalloids, Ph's, THMs and rest of pollutants were high in all conditions and beyond the conventional treatment. • Pilot-scale testing of the ETAPERN pilot plant provided an opportunity to study the removal of trace organic contaminants occurring at very low concentrations under real membrane operating conditions using authentic feed water matrix and at a scale representative of full scale operations. • Reservoir raw and treated waters had a strong hydrophilic composition. This kind of materials can be related to a higher membrane biofouling tendency. NF membranes efficiently removed the rest of hydrophobic compounds resulting hydrophilic materials in the major component of permeate. Acknowledgments The authors want to thank the Andalusian Water Agency (Ministry of Environment, Regional Government of Andalusia) (No. OT2007/ 212) for their financial support of this work, which is part of a broader research project called ETAP-ERN. We also want to thank to Consorcio de Aguas de la Zona Gaditana (CAZG) for their collaboration during our ETAPERN project. This work was also supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the MEST (No. 2012047029 (TOC)).