Investigation of Ammonium Sulfate/Ammonium Di-Hydrogen Phosphate fertilizers as Draw Solute for Forward Osmosis Desalination.

Forward osmosis (FO) is an osmotically driven membrane process in which the driving force for separation is the difference in chemical potential between a concentrated draw solution and a broad range of aqueous solutions, including contaminated water.FO can be suitably used to desalinate water for irrigation, using fertilizer as draw agent where the desalinated water containing diluted draw solution can be directly applied for fertigation. This paper is concerned with the investigation of ammonium sulfate and ammonium dihydrogen phosphate fertilizers and their blend as draw agents for forward osmosis desalination. By comparing the performance of the two compounds at different molar concentrations against distilled water feed water, it was found that 2 M ammonium sulfate solution gave the highest performance (12 L/m 2 hr). The application of