Energy Requirements and Costs for Modern Water Desalination
The lack of potable water affects 88 developing countries, home to half of the world's population. Consequently, 80-90% of all diseases and 30% of all deaths in these countries result from poor water quality. Producing desalination technologies in order to purify water can help decrease this proportional epidemic. However, the biggest challenge of these desalination technologies is const - they are currently expensive to purchase and operate. The purpose of this experiment was to observe and understand the processes of desalination in order to find the minimum energy requirements for desalinating water, as well as minimum liquid water discharge. Freezing water is more energy efficient than boiling water since it requires approximately three times the energy to boil water than to freeze it. Thus, a freeze distillation project was designed and created. Three experiments were constructed and the energy efficiencies were determined. The minimum energy to desalinate water was determined using thermodynamic approaches. The first and second experiments used 7.32 MJ to desalinate water, while the third experiment used 11.6 MJ. It was found that the main factor that contributed in the energy differences was time.
School:
Allan Hancock College
Department:
Civil and Mechanical Engineering
Research Advisor:
John G. Georgiadis
Department of Research Advisor:
bioengineering
Year of Publication:
2005