Solar Thermal‐Driven Desalination Pursuing Products of Pure Water and Salts and Leaving Minimum Impact to Environment

Abstract

Desalination, removal of salt and other minerals from seawater, brackish water, and wastewater, is becoming a promising solution for providing the increasing need of freshwater. It is highly desirable that environmentally friendly renewable energy resources be utilized for water treatment to minimize the consumption of fossil fuels. Given that most desalination systems can directly use thermal energy, concentrated solar thermal energy is very suitable for application to the water treatment. To avoid the potential negative impacts from disposing the concentrates, recovery of important minerals from concentrates to achieve zero discharge is a promising option. The recent technology development on solar thermal energy storages has shown that sea salts are very promising materials for large-scale thermal energy storage. Hence, a full separation of salts and water in desalination process becomes a necessity in advanced water treatment technologies, which should be achieved in an economically feasible way. Literature review and studies about innovative concept of full separation desalination system will be presented in this study. A full separation device integrated with conventional multieffect distillation or multistage flashing water treatment system will be introduced into the system design to enhance the water productivity and thermal efficiency.

Options for Improved Treatment of Saline Wastewater From Fish and Shellfish Processing

“…Due to the requirement of significant energy and its related costs in terms of energy and maintenance, overall treatment costs rise significantly with the addition of a desalination step. In 2013, desalination, removal of salt from seawater, brackish water, and wastewater was calculated to cost between United States $0.45 to United States $1.00 per m 3 (Xu et al, 2017).…”