Performance of physical treatment method and different commercial antiscalants to control scaling deposition in desalination plant

• A literature survey on magnetic treatment (MT) & scale controlling was conducted.
• The effect of MT on seawater/drinking water characteristics was examined.
• The effect of MT and four commercial antiscalants on scaling retention time (RT) was examined.
• MT succeeds in increasing RT of CaSO4, BaSO4 and CaCO3 for 45, 20 and 10 min respectively.
• The performance of MT was found similar to the performance of antiscalants.

A literature survey was conducted at Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research (KISR), to investigate the effect of magnetic treatment method (MTM) on the water quality and controlling scaling deposition in RO plants. The result of the literature survey reported many positive experiments confirming the ability of MTM on retarding scaling deposition. So, two experiments were carried out at Doha reverse osmosis plant (DROP) to examine the effect of magnetic treatment method (MTM) on the chemical composition of two different solutions; potable water and seawater. The results show that MTM did not change the chemical composition, hardness, organic materials and trace metals. However, it was noticed that MTM affects clearly the turbidity and total suspended solids (TSSs) of tested water. A third experiment was conducted to investigate the effect of MTM in retarding calcium carbonate, calcium sulfate and barium sulfate scaling at ambient temperature and constant magnetic field (MF). The performance of MTM was compared to the performance of four commercial antiscalants in retarding the scaling deposition. The current paper summarizes the literature survey and expresses the results of experimental work. The results showed that the MTM was effective in increasing the retention time required for scaling.