Desalination accounts for less than 1% of water consumption, but is highly significant. As desalination can produce water in regions where natural water supplies are stressed or of very poor quality.
Two types of water desalination technologies are in current use to produce desalinated water:
- distillation or thermal (MSF or MED), which includes cogeneration of electricity and water and is predominant in the Gulf
- membrane, of which reverse osmosis (RO) is the leading technology, followed by electrodialysis (ED).
Other desalination processes are under development but are not yet competitive.
Thermal desalination exploits the fact that water molecules vaporise at a lower temperature than dissolved salts and other molecules. Therefore, feed water can be heated and then evaporated to separate out the dissolved salts from pure water.
Three different thermal desalination technologies have emerged: multistage flash (MSF), multi effect distillation (MED) and mechanical vapour compression/ vapour compression (MVC/VC). MSF is Highlighted below.
Multi-stage flash desalination occurs through a series of stages:
- The feed water, usually seawater, passes through a heating stage.
- The feed water is heated in successive stages.
- Then the feed water is heated in a brine heater using externally supplied steam.
- After that, the feed water is passed through various stages and is subjected to several ‘flashes’ of heat. The temperature and pressure of each successive stage declines.
- The water boils, evaporates, condenses and the pure water produced is collected.
Some energy recovery occurs when the boiled products in each stage cool releasing heat and through the recycling of brine water. Brine water recycling reduces the costs of desalination by reducing the vaporisation temperature of the water present, although there’s an increased risk of corrosion (6, diagram above). The number of stages relates to the efficiency and energy use and reuse of the system.
Medium, large and very large capacity MSF plants can be produced – the largest plant has a capacity of and thus the potential to produce 800,000 m3 of fresh water per day. Capital costs for the medium and large plants are considerably lower than smaller plants per volume of water produced, and they are very energy efficient. The average life-time of the plants is 20 to 30 years due to recent advances in minimising the corrosion of tubes inside the plant.
This is the most robust desalination technology.
