A New Method for Desalination of Seawater With Steam-Ejector Refrigeration Plant

Abstract

Desalination of seawater has played an important role in many arid regions in the world. There are many methods for desalination of seawater, such as MED, MSF, RO, ED, TVC, and MVC, etc. Different methods have different advantages and disadvantages. In the present work, a new method for desalination of seawater with steam-ejector refrigeration plant was introduced. The main purpose of the new method is a hybrid plant of TVC and steam-ejector refrigeration. In the hybrid circle, no other energy was need. When the steam-ejector refrigeration plant is working, the seawater as cooling water is introduced into evaporator of TVC and evaporates. The vapor getting in TVC is extracted by a second steam-ejector, together with the active steam, is used as source of heat for desalination. The main advantage of this hybrid plant is that part of the heat energy of cooling water in refrigeration is reused. Comparing with other distillation method desalination of seawater, the energy consumption is much less. Especially on marine usage, the advantage is clear.

Experimental and numerical investigation of a solar eductor-assisted low-pressure water desalination system

“…Eductor pumps have been the subject of research for a range of applications including geothermal energy, breweries, sugar refineries, and air conditioning [29][30][31][32]. They have also been investigated for their potential in water desalination systems, including solar-assisted vacuum freezing ejector absorption (VFEA) desalination plant [33] and steam-ejector refrigeration plants [34] which were shown to require less energy when steam ejectors were used to assist the heat recovery in the vapor compression systems. The case for exploiting low grade heat sources in desalination was made by Li in his thesis [35], and he proposed two cogeneration systems, one coupled to RO and the second to MED in conjunction with a Supercritical Organic Rankine Cycle (SORC) and an Ejector.…”