Carbon filter backwash with RO brine

[Watro]

Anyone please advise if an Activated Carbon filter be back washed with RO brine?
The purpose of ACF is to remove traces of free chlorine and any organics present in the feed sea water, flow rate is ~900 m3/hr
Multimedia filter present upstream of ACF and equipment all together are part of a SWRO system

Please advise Pros and cons

Regards
NM

 

[ashtree]

One of the problems with backwashing with the RO brine is that the brine or concentrate stream contains a whole lot of things (now concentrated) that you might be trying to get rid of with the carbon filter in the first place.

The other issue is that after backwashing with the brine stream you will have to be certain that you have rinsed all the brine out before bringing the system back on line. Otherwise instead of the RO seeing feed water of 30,000mg/l TDS it may be 50,000 mg/l until the brine is past through the system. This will really cause havoc with pressures and recoveries.

Regards
Ashtree
"Any water can be made potable if you filter it through enough money"

 

[bimr]

Don't believe that backwashing with RO brine would be good practice.

The brine will be saturated with salts and you may end up with a scaling problem. This practice will also require an extensive rinse to remove the salts left over from the backwash.

A suggestion is that you configure your system with multiple filters and backwash one filter at a time with the effluent from the other online filters.

 

[Watro]

Thank you Gentlemen