Water Scarcity in Basrah City, New Disaster Needs Direct Solutions

Basrah city, one of the industrial cities in the southern part of Iraq, is facing environmental ruin due to the reduction of water quantity and increasing the salinity. This is due to the upstream dams in Turkey, Syria and Iran have shrunken the rivers and their tributaries, seasonal rainfall has dropped and infrastructure has fallen into disrepair. The result is an acute lack of freshwater that has allowed a salty tide from the nearby Persian Gulf to advance north from the Shatt al-Arab waterway, the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates. Consequently, most of water desalination plant have deactivated or stopped due to the increasing of water salinity. This research deals with the experimental evaluation of the permeate water quality of reverse osmosis RO desalination plant for two cases. In the first case, the raw water after treatment processes was fed directly to the RO desalination plant while in the second case, modified, a part of the permeate water (by about 40%) was recycled back and mixed with the treated water. The following modification was carried out in water plant which has a capacity of 10m3/h. The plant withdraws water from Basrah Water cannel as a raw water having total dissolved solid less than 1200ppm. The plant consists of three vessels where each vessel contains five RO membranes. The results depict the quality of permeate water of case 2 has improved by about 57.3% relative to the case 1. Also, the results revealed that the water productivity of the case2 has reduced by about 40% than case 1. The current study submitted to the Iraqi Ministry of Water Resources to apply this idea in water desalination plants that have stopped due to the high salinity of Shat Al-Arab river.

کلیدواژه ها:

water scarcity ، water desalination ، performance ، salinity