DEIONIZATION ECONOMICS ION EXCHANGE MAINTENANCE MEMBRANES REVERSE OSMOSIS SEMICONDUCTORS WASTEWATER

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Abstract

hen the energy and chemical prices surge, saving energy and chemical costs are not only environmental issues, but also important strategies for a company seeking to reduce production costs. In high-purity water systems, the reverse osmosis (RO) membrane process has played a key role for producing semiconductor-grade purity water, which is essential for wafer production (1). Therefore, reducing its operating costs has become more and more important for semiconductor manufacturing companies. There are a lot of approaches that have been implemented to reduce RO system operation costs, such as saving energy by energy recovery device (2), employing low-pressure RO elements to reduce energy cost (3, 4), increasing recovery rate to decrease specific energy consumption (5), mitigating RO membrane fouling by pretreatment improvement and cleaning optimization (6), and replacing aged RO element (7). In addition to designing an RO system that has a high recovery rate, and therefore low-specific energy consumption, low-energy RO elements have been employed to save energy further in a high-purity water system at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) Fab 3 since 1994. TSMC always aims to seek opportunities to save energy and reduce chemicals in their high-purity water system. Therefore, novel RO elements, which deliver higher rejection rate at lower energy requirements (8), have been selected to replace aged ones. The company has gained benefits through savings in energy and chemical use through this RO elements upgrade.

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