Concept and investigation of Selective Forward Osmosis (SFO) for Salt-Salt Separation as a Pretreatment of Seawater for Resource Utilization

Abstract

Seawater utilization is crucial for the sustainable human development. Despite growing interest in forward osmosis (FO) due to its unique properties, conventional FO membranes with salt-water selectivity have limitations in applying to specific salt-salt separation processes, which hinders their application in resource utilization. In this work, a new concept, "selective forward osmosis (SFO)", was proposed, which ingeniously employed an SFO membrane consisting of an ion-selective layer on a denser substrate. The denser substrate is designed to control water flux so as to alleviate the solution dilution and improve the salt-salt separation. Moreover, the sucrose and pure water were used separately as feed solution to provide different water flux to influence the various salt fluxes, showing that pure water feed could enhance the salt-salt separation efficiency, although it could dilute the draw solution to some extent. Therefore, pure water was selected as feed in the subsequent experiments. The optimized SFO membrane achieved high Na₂SO₄/NaCl selectivity (∼54.8) and MgCl₂/NaCl selectivity (∼9.2) in single-salt draw solutions. With mixed-salt and heavy-metal-mixed-salt draw solutions, the Mg²⁺/Na⁺ selectivity was enhanced to ∼14.5, and further to 29.3. In real seawater tests, the SFO system effectively permeated monovalent elements (such as Na flux of ∼68.6 g m^-2 h^-1) while maintaining a higher rejection for bivalent elements (such as Mg flux of ∼0.08 g m^-2 h^-1), showing high selectivities for Mg/Na, U/Na, Sr/Na, Ni/Na, and Ca/Na. These results demonstrate the potential of SFO for resource utilization, especially in complex saline environments. This work contributes a new route for salt-salt separation in the pretreatment of seawater resources.

Keywords: FO membranes; Salt-salt separation; Seawater resource utilization; Selective forward osmosis.