What are the Criteria of Water Desalination?
Water plays an indispensable role in an individual's life and is almost used in every activity we do in our daily routines. It engulfs nearly 71% of our planet; still, we have only 1% of it to use for our daily chores. This is why it becomes important to treat water.
Various technologies and techniques can do water treatment. However, this article will discuss desalination and know which technology is used for low energy desalination.
Desalination is a technology that takes away mineral components from salty water. If we talk about it in layman's language, salts and minerals are removed from a targeted substance. For instance, seawater which is highly concentrated with salts, is desalinated to produce water suitable for irrigation or human consumption. The result of this desalination is that the byproduct of the process is brine ( a highly concentrated solution of salt in water). In contrast to brine, the other stream water obtained is treated potable freshwater with fewer salts and minerals, also called treated water or product water.
This seems like it will require a lot of energy and is not cost-effective. Well, it was right for former times as a lot of energy was consumed. Also, desalination seawater costs much more than desalinating freshwater from groundwater or surface water. However, with the advancement of technology, reduced energy desalination processes are used as it is more cost-effective than other potable water techniques used to meet the growing demands.
Since we have mentioned the energy consumed by the techniques, we will look more into it in the next segment of the article.
Energy Consumption
Initially, desalination was considered the last resort after water conservation as a lot of energy was invested in the process. But this changes as prices continue to fall.
The energy absorption in the desalination process depends on the saltiness of the water. Seawater desalination requires more energy than Brackish water.
But, now, with reduced energy desalination processes like reverse osmosis, low energy desalination is possible. Under 2kWh/m has been achieved by using reverse osmosis technology.
Now that we have glanced over the desalination terms and their energy consumption, we will look at the factors that distinguish them from typical drinking water operations.
Factors distinguishing typical water operations are as follows:
Source Water Quality
High levels of specific metals and salts include calcium, sodium, magnesium, iodides, bromides, sulfates, chlorides.
Total dissolved solids (ranging upto 40,000 ppm)
Petroleum contamination potential
Total Organic type
Microbial contaminants and other organisms
Treatment
Leachates from system components
RO membranes and distillation
Pretreatment and anti-fouling additives
Blending with source waters
Disinfection byproducts
Distribution
Corrosion products
Corrosion control additives
Bacterial regrowth
Multiple processes are used for desalination. But, these are divided into two categories. Read along to know the technologies used for desalination.
Desalination Technologies
Thermal Processes
Multi-stage Flash Distillation (MSF)
Co-generation
Multiple-Effect Evaporation (MED)
Vapor Compression Evaporation (VC)
Membrane Technologies
Electrodialysis (ED)
Reverse Osmosis
Membrane Distillation
Other than those mentioned earlier, two alternative processes are used to desalinate water: Freezing and Ion Exchange.
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