Desalination Technology In Clean Water

Water resources are critical resources in the world. The percentage of fresh water resources is normally less compared to the saltwater. Approximately 2.5% of the total world water resources are freshwater resources (Shatat and Riffat, 2012). The remaining 97.5% consist of salt water located in the oceans and seas (Shatat and Riffat, 2012). Of the available fresh water, only a small amount is available for human use. Approximately 0.014% of the total 2.5% can be accessed directly for human use (Shatat and Riffat, 2012). Thus, application of new technologies involved in extraction water from salt water may be required. Such a process may involve the application of desalination technology. Water and energy are closely linked to the extent that

In the UAE, the number of desalination plants is about 70, and this is about 14% of the total world operating capacity and two-thirds of these are located in Abu Dhabi (Hamdan, 2014). Methods of production of desalinated water include using reverse osmosis (RO) technology and thermal desalination. According to Hamdan (2014), thermal desalination may consist of Multi-Stage Flash and Multi-Effect Distillation among other processes. Multi-Stage Flash desalination accounts for 75% of the desalination while the Multi-Effect Distillation technology accounts for about 18% of the desalination. Reverse Osmosis technology only accounted for 7% of Abu Dhabi’s capacity in 2011 (Hamdan, 2014). The advantage of using MSF technology is that it has a large capacity and high reliability and is economical in terms of consumption of energy required for the desalination

The major processes may be grouped into two categories, which include thermal processes and membrane processes. Alternative processes include freezing and ion exchange (Shatat and Riffat, 2012).

Thermal desalination

Thermal desalinization is also referred to as distillation and consists of several processes. The method is applied to seawater and brackish water following principles of evaporation and condensation (Shatat and Riffat, 2012). As such, heating the seawater or brackish water until evaporation occurs leaves behind salt and the vapor is then condensed to provide fresh water. Several processes involved in the distillation process include Multi-stage flash distillation (MSF), Multiple-effect distillation (MED), cogeneration, vapor-compression evaporation (VC) and solar water desalination (Shatat and Riffat, 2012).

Multi-stage Flash