Water Resources Research Act Program

Details for Project ID 2020ND092B

Red Lake River and Red River Raw Water Quality Investigation

Institute: North Dakota
Year Established: 2020 Start Date: 2020-02-29 End Date: 2021-02-27
Total Federal Funds: $2,199 Total Non-Federal Funds: $4,398

Principal Investigators: Feng

Project Summary: The city of Grand Forks (ND) has built a new drinking-water treatment plant that treat surface water from Red River and Red Lake River by two systems. In one of the systems, conventional processes will be used. Another system consists of membrane filtration technologies, including ultrafiltration and reverse osmosis. The pretreatment of membrane filtration is a coagulation/flocculation process. However, our preliminary data show that total organic carbon (TOC) after conventional/enhanced coagulation is still greater than 3.5 mg/L that appears to be too high for membrane filtration. In addition, removal of TOC from water prior to chlorine disinfection is able to reduce the formation of cariogenic disinfection byproducts. We propose in this project to identify the major sources of TOC in Red River and Red Lake Rivers in order to reduce the input of TOC to the drinking-water treatment plant and mitigate the organic fouling of membranes and reduce the formation of disinfection byproducts.