Advantages Of Desalination Technology

Human life and production are inextricably linked to fresh water. However, nearly 97.5% of the world 's total water resources is salinity water such as seawater. With the rapid development of the economy and population explosion, the shortage of freshwater resources has become a growing global environmental problem. Desalination technology is deemed to be an effective means to solve the shortage of freshwater resources. It is the process of utilizing energy, such as the heat, electricity and other energy, to separate the dissolved mineral salts, organisms, bacteria and viruses, and solids in seawater. According to the separation process, the classification of seawater desalination technology is illustrated in Fig.1. Multi-stage flash (MSF), multi-effect distillation (MED) and reverse osmosis (RO) are the commercial desalination technologies widely applied in the industry. The global total desalination capacity is around 74.8 million m3/d by 2011, 63% of the total capacity is produced by RO, 23% by MSF and 8% by MED [1].
MED originated in the 1830s. But it had been subjected to heat transfer surface easy to scale. Until the 1960s, the problem of scale and corrosion had been alleviated by the development of low-temperature multi-effect distillation technology, which uses the horizontal tube falling film evaporator. A series of studies were conducted to investigate the complex heat transfer and flow processes in the horizontal tube falling film evaporator such as the heat