Minireview: Membrane forward osmosis as alternative method in water treatment

Abstract

Water scarcity and limited water access for the community have encouraged the development of various technologies to facilitate access to various water sources in nature. Sea and brackish water desalination are the fastest and comfortable to meet growing water needs. The forward osmosis membranes is an alternative method for removing salt and impurity compounds both in brackish water and seawater to replace the reverse osmosis process in desalination of seawater and brackish water which are cheaper and environmentally friendly. A number of successes have been achieved in preparing FO membranes. Membranes can be made from either natural polymers or synthetic polymers. FO membrane performance improvement is still a challenge that researchers must continue to study and the challenges in implementing FO membranes on a large scale still face problems in the field that need to be overcome. In this paper discuss advance in FO membrane for seawater and brackish water desalination.