AWWA JAW58359

Monitoring membrane integrity is critical to ensuring water quality. The current approach involves taking a rack offline and conducting a pressure decay test. However, this approach is not in real time and can be disruptive to production. The authors examine how turbidity, a well-accepted measurement of filtered water quality, can be used in a distributed manner to monitor membrane integrity in real time cost-effectively with distributed laser turbidimetry. This technique can reduce system downtime and rapidly detect defective membranes. The study results also indicate that for monitoring membrane integrity, distributing the turbidity monitoring instruments may be more effective than increasing their sensitivity. Includes 14 references, tables, figures.