Global Sensitivity Analysis of Reverse Osmosis Processes

The desalination of seawater is generally performed by reverse osmosis (RO), because of the product quality and the low costs involved. Models describing the RO process are generally used for the simulation or design of industrial plant. However, none of the existing models in the related literature have been used to study the effect of the distribution of the input variable uncertainties on plant responses and the sensitivity of these, which is the objective of this work. The results indicate that the type of uncertainties of the input variables does not substantially influence on the model responses and on its sensitivity. In addition, the histogram associated with the permeate salt concentration has a similar behavior to the log-normal distribution, while the histogram of water recovery has a not known tendency. Finally, the results of this study indicate that global sensitivity analysis (GSA) can supplement modelling studies of RO plants.