Trends in thermal desalination processes

Abstract

Papers presented to the 11th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, South Africa, 20-23 July 2015.

Water is life. The availability of sufficient quantity of high quality water for drinking, domestic uses and commercial and industrial applications is critical to health and wellbeing, and the opportunity to achieve human and economic development. Water is becoming an increasingly precious commodity in most of the Gulf States, Australia, China, Japan, the United States, Spain and other European countries, and Caribbean nations. Water desalination industry proved to be a viable and sustainable source for fresh water. In some places, water desalination is the only source for fresh water supply. Water desalination industry has evolved from a limited number of small-scale desalination units to huge. e production plants. Success of the desalination industry is proved to be a result of continuous research and development and adoption of such developments on industrial. One of the major developments, which proved to have a strong and positive impact on the industry and the unit product cost is the increase in the production capacity of the plant. Searching for better operation and lower production cost, the producers have adopted several other industrial trends; Such as use of heat pumps, use of new material of construction, and inexpensive composites polymers and the decrease the number of pumps. The evaluation also addresses several of the new innovations, which remains to be adopted on industrial scale. Increase in the plant capacity remains to be one of the leading techniques, where technical difficulties in increasing the capacity are approached by innovative solutions. Also, use of heat pumps, such adsorption and absorption cycles, promise to be of very high advantage in enhancing the process performance.