Monitoring membrane integrity is critical to ensuring
water quality. The current approach involves
taking a rack offline and conducting a pressure
decay test. However, this approach is not in real time
and can be disruptive to production. The authors
examine how turbidity, a well-accepted measurement
of filtered water quality, can be used in a distributed
manner to monitor membrane integrity in real time
cost-effectively with distributed laser turbidimetry. This
technique can reduce system downtime and rapidly
detect defective membranes. The study results also
indicate that for monitoring membrane integrity, distributing
the turbidity monitoring instruments may be
more effective than increasing their sensitivity. Includes 14 references, tables, figures.