Enhancing Water Quality Through Integrated Reverse Osmosis and UV Disinfection: Optimization Using an Intelligent Algorithm

Ultraviolet (UV) disinfection is widely used in water treatment; however, its effectiveness strongly depends on water optical quality (e.g., turbidity, total dissolved solids, and UV transmittance, UVT). This study investigates an integrated RO–UV scheme in which reverse osmosis (RO) pretreatment improves UVT and thereby increases the effective UV dose available for microbial inactivation. First, UV-only reactor performance is characterized using literature data to fit an intensity-specific dose response relationship. The RO contribution is then incorporated at the process level through a UVT based coupling and evaluated using deterministic low/central/high scenarios (p05/p50/p95) constructed from assumed input ranges. Finally, a multi-objective optimization solved with the Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) is used to identify operating conditions that maximize predicted bacterial log-inactivation while limiting a UV-equivalent energy proxy based on nominal UV dose. Across the investigated flow-rate and intensity ranges, RO pretreatment yields a systematic increase in effective dose (median gain ≈6.8%) and a corresponding improvement in predicted inactivation, with the marginal benefit depending on the dose response regime.