On the evaluating membrane flux of forward osmosis systems: Data assessment and advanced intelligent modeling

As an emerging desalination technology, forward osmosis (FO) can potentially become a reliable method to help remedy the current water crisis. Introducing uncomplicated and precise models could help FO systems' optimization. This paper presents the prediction and evaluation of FO systems' membrane flux using various artificial intelligence-based models. Detailed data gathering and cleaning were emphasized because appropriate modeling requires precise inputs. Accumulating data from the original sources, followed by duplicate removal, outlier detection, and feature selection, paved the way to begin modeling. Six models were executed for the prediction task, among which two are tree-based models, two are deep learning models, and two are miscellaneous models. The calculated coefficient of determination (R² ) of our best model (XGBoost) was 0.992. In conclusion, tree-based models (XGBoost and CatBoost) show more accurate performance than neural networks. Furthermore, in the sensitivity analysis, feed solution (FS) and draw solution (DS) concentrations showed a strong correlation with membrane flux. PRACTITIONER POINTS: The FO membrane flux was predicted using a variety of machine-learning models. Thorough data preprocessing was executed. The XGBoost model showed the best performance, with an R² of 0.992. Tree-based models outperformed neural networks and other models.