Desalination

Water from Water

Jane Kucera

• Publisher: Wiley-Scrivener
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781119407744
• eBook ISBN: 9781119407898
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Organic Chemistry

This all-new revised edition of a modern classic is the most comprehensive and up-to-date coverage of the "green" process of desalination in industrial and municipal applications, covering all of the processes and equipment necessary to design, operate, and troubleshoot desalination systems. This is becoming increasingly more important for not only our world's industries, but our world's populations, as pure water becomes more and more scarce.

"Blue is the new green." This is an all-new revised edition of a modern classic on one of the most important subjects in engineering: Water. Featuring a total revision of the initial volume, this is the most comprehensive and up-to-date coverage of the process of desalination in industrial and municipal applications, a technology that is becoming increasingly more important as more and more companies choose to "go green." This book covers all of the processes and equipment necessary to design, operate, and troubleshoot desalination systems, from the fundamental principles of desalination technology and membranes to the much more advanced engineering principles necessary for designing a desalination system. Earlier chapters cover the basic principles, the economics of desalination, basic terms and definitions, and essential equipment.

The book then goes into the thermal processes involved in desalination, such as various methods of evaporation, distillation, recompression, and multistage flash. Following that is an exhaustive discussion of the membrane processes involved in desalination, such as reverse osmosis, forward osmosis, and electrodialysis. Finally, the book concludes with a chapter on the future of these technologies and their place in industry and how they can be of use to society.

This book is a must-have for anyone working in water, for engineers, technicians, scientists working in research and development, and operators. It is also useful as a textbook for graduate classes studying industrial water applications.

Chapter 1
Introduction to Desalination

Jane Kucera

Nalco Water/an Ecolab Company

Corresponding author: Jane Kucera ([email protected])

Abstract

The availability of fresh water on the planet is finite, and natural fresh water makes up only about 0.5% entire water supply on Earth. This limited supply, coupled with the growing population of the Earth and the growing industrialization of many developing countries, is driving global fresh water stress and scarcity to the point where more fresh water must be found to meet future needs. Methods to “find” more fresh water include conservation and reduce/reuse/recycle of existing fresh water sources, moving fresh water from water-rich regions to water-poor regions, and “creating” fresh water from other sources, such as oceans and wastewater, using desalination. Of these methods, desalination has proven to be a very viable technique to meet current and future fresh water needs in many areas around the world.

This introductory chapter discusses the history of, and drivers for desalination, and also provides a framework for the detailed discussions about various desalination technologies and opportunities to use renewable energy sources to power the desalination technologies that are presented in this book.

Keywords: Desalination, water scarcity, thermal desalination, membrane desalination, reverse osmosis, renewable energy sources

1.1 Introduction

Desalination: from the root word desalt meaning to “remove salt from” [1]. By convention, the term desalination is defined as the “process of removing dissolved solids, such as salts and minerals, from water” [2]. Other terms that are sometimes used interchangeably with desalination are desalting and desalinization, although these terms have alternate meanings; desalting is conventionally used to mean removing salt from other more valuable products such as food, pharmaceuticals, and oil, while desalinization is used to mean removing salt from soil, such as by leaching [2].

The first practical use of desalination goes back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when sailors such as Sir Richard Hawkins reported that their men generated fresh water from seawater using shipboard distillation during their voyages [3]. The early twentieth century saw the first desalination facilities developed on the Island of Curaçao and in the Arabian Peninsula [3]. The research into and application of desalination gained momentum in the mid-twentieth century, and the last 30 years has witnessed exponential growth in the construction of desalination facilities.

One could ask the question, “Why desalination?” Desalination has become necessary for several reasons, the most compelling of which may be: 1) the increased demand for fresh water by population growth in arid climates and other geographies with limited access to high-quality, low-salinity water, and 2) the per capital increase in demand for fresh water due to industrialization and urbanization that out paces availability of high-quality water. Research and development over the last 50 years into desalination has resulted in advanced techniques that have made desalination more efficient and cost-effective. Desalination is, and will be in the future, a viable and even necessary technique for generating fresh water from water of relatively low quality. Thus, the title of this book, Desalination: Water from Water.

In this chapter, and in this entire book, we make the case for desalination as one of the major tools for meet...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Introduction to Desalination
• Chapter 2: Thermal Desalination Processes
• Chapter 3: Basic Terms and Definitions
• Chapter 4: Nanofiltration – Theory and Application
• Chapter 5: Forward Osmosis
• Chapter 6: Electrodialysis Desalination
• Chapter 7: Continuous Electrodeionization
• Chapter 8: Membrane Distillation: Now and Future
• Chapter 9: Humidification-Dehumidification Desalination
• Chapter 10: Freezing-Melting Desalination Processes
• Chapter 11: Ion Exchange in Desalination
• Chapter 12: Electrosorption of Heavy Metals with Capacitive Deionization: Water Reuse, Desalination and Resources Recovery
• Chapter 13: Solar Desalination
• Chapter 14: Wind Energy Powered Desalination Systems
• Chapter 15: Geothermal Desalination
• Chapter 16: Future Expectations
• List of Contributors
• Index
• End User License Agreement