Unlocking groundwater desalination potential for agriculture with fertilizer drawn forward osmosis: prediction and performance optimization via RSM and ANN

The agricultural sector uses 70% of the world’s freshwater. As clean water is extracted, groundwater quality decreases, making it difficult to grow crops. Brackish water desalination is a promising solution for agricultural areas, but the cost is a barrier to adoption. This study investigated the performance of the fertilizer drawn forward osmosis (FDFO) process for brackish water desalination using response surface methodology (RSM) and artificial neural network (ANN) approaches. The RSM model was used to identify the optimal operating conditions, and the ANN model was used to predict the water flux (J w ) and reverse solute flux (J s ). Both models achieved high accuracy, with RSM excelling in predicting J s ( R 2 = 0.9614) and ANN performing better for J w ( R 2 = 0.9801). Draw solution (DS) concentration emerged as the most critical factor for both models, having a relative importance of 100% for two outputs. The optimal operating conditions identified by RSM were a DS concentration of 22 mol L −1 , and identical feed solution (FS) and DS velocities of 8.1 cm s −1 . This configuration yielded a high J w of 4.386 LMH and a low J s of 0.392 gMH. Furthermore, the study evaluated the applicability of FDFO for real brackish groundwater. The results confirm FDFO’s potential as a viable technology for water recovery in agriculture. The standalone FO system proves to be less energy-intensive than other desalination technologies. However, FO exhibits a low recovery rate, which may necessitate further dilution for fertigation purposes.