Marine Desalination

Water is indisputably the most essential natural resource the earth has to offer the human race. It is essential to sustaining life itself. Unfortunately over 97% of the water on earth is distributed across our oceans and seas as saltwater, rendering it unsuitable for general use. The majority of the world's drinking and cleaning water is thus taken from rivers, lakes and groundwater systems. (more)

What is Reverse Osmosis?

Natural osmosis in seawater occurs when a semi-permeable membrane separates two fluids of different salinity. The fluid with the lower salinity will pass through the membrane until the salt solution becomes equal on both sides of the membrane. If pressure is exerted on the higher salinity solution the membrane allows desalinated, de-mineralized water to pass into the pure solution. Dissolved impurities are rejected, and the process is known as "reverse osmosis."

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Pall Marine Disc Tube™ Technology

The unit consists of a chamber of discs interleaved with flat membrane cushions held in a tubular chamber. Seawater under pressure flows up and over each membrane cushion, allowing water to pass through a semi-permeable membrane ensuring minimal salt passage, and is collected as a clean water stream.

Over 30 percent of the water passed through the system is recovered as pure, safe, bacteria and virus free potable water with excellent taste. The water meets and exceeds World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines with consistent and guaranteed results.

Installation, operation and maintenance costs are low, membrane life expectancy is 5 years or more and when in need of replacement, individual membranes rather than complete modules can be easily replaced. The system is self cleaning and being modular in design, can be adapted to suit whatever the available space, particularly attractive for retrofit and refit installations.

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When pure water sources cannot be tapped, such as in the case of long-term seagoing vessels, the only options are either excessive storage and complex handling procedures, or extracting pure water from the sea.

Pall Marine has developed proprietary advanced design reverse osmosis (RO) technologies to provide high grade drinking water from seawater or other sources in a single automated process, without the need for chemical cleaning or pretreatment. Our clean drinking water systems have been employed in over 1,800 applications globally on all types of craft including modern cruise liners, leisure, merchant and military vessels.