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Beneficial Industrial Uses of Electricity: Industrial Introduction and Process Industries
Published in Clark W. Gellings, 2 Emissions with Electricity, 2020
Desalination is the removal of salt from seawater or brackish water to produce pure water for municipal and/or industrial uses. A number of energy-intensive processes have been developed for desalination in-cluding reverse osmosis (RO), distillation, electrodialysis, and mechanical vapor recompression. Electricity consumption can range from 4 to 45 MWh per million gallons (1 to 12 MWh per thousand m3) of water treated, depending on the process. Electricity can also account for up to 50% or more of the annual operating costs for desalination facilities. Desalination will be a necessary alternative for water-short areas and will grow in market size as populations increase and water sources diminish. Availability of low-carbon electricity could facilitate this market growth (EPRI 1014570).
New PV Markets Sustaining Mass Production
Published in Peter F. Varadi, Wolfgang Palz, Michael Eckhart, Allan R. Hoffman, Paula Mints, Bill Rever, John Wohlgemuth, Frank P.H. Wouters, Sun Towards High Noon, 2017
Reverse osmosis (RO), the most common type of desalination in use today (65% of installed capacity), requires no thermal energy, just mechanical pressure (800–900 psi) to force salty water through a membrane that separates the salt from the water. Electricity is needed to create this pressure, creating an opportunity for solar PV to provide the needed electricity. Energy-wise, RO is the most efficient of today’s desalination technologies, requiring 3.0–5.5 kWh per cubic meter of fresh water produced, depending on the salinity of the source, seawater or brackish water. Saline water comes in different strengths and is categorized as follows: highly saline water: 10,000–35,000 ppm; brackish water: 1,000–10,000 ppm; fresh water: less than 1,000 ppm. Brackish water can be found in underground fossil water aquifers and is created when seawater invades fresh water supplies. Unfortunately, this is occurring more frequently today as sea levels rise due to global warming.
Coastal Groundwater Development: Challenges and Opportunities
Published in M. Thangarajan, Vijay P. Singh, Groundwater Assessment, Modeling, and Management, 2016
Lennox A. Gladden, Namsik S. Park
Desalination (also called desalinization) is the process of removing dissolved salts from water, thus producing freshwater from either brackish or seawater. Of the many applications for which it can be used, the most common use is to produce potable water for domestic use by removing salt from saline or brackish water. International Development Association (IDA) reported that as of 2013, there were over 17,000 desalination plants worldwide spread across 150 countries with a global capacity of 80 million m3/d, which is equivalent to 66.5 million m3/d. This desalinated water is relied on by 300 million people for some if not all of their daily needs. Out of approximately 17,346 contracted and online desalination plants across the globe, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), which comprises Qatar, The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates, holds 7499, which is 43% the total number of online desalination plants. The GCC also accounts for 62,340,000 m3/d of the 94,500,000 online capacity.
Feasibility assessment of a BWRO desalination plant powered by renewable energy sources
Published in Journal of Applied Water Engineering and Research, 2022
Albashir K. Elfaqih, Said O. Belhaj, Abualqasem M. Sawed
All naturally occurring waters contain some level of total dissolved solids (TDS), a measure of the concentration of all inorganic and organic dissolved substances, including salts and minerals. TDS determines whether a surface water or groundwater resource is fresh or brackish. Brackish groundwater contains a TDS greater than freshwater but less than seawater. A variety of classification schemes are used to categorize waters with different TDS. Brackish groundwater falls within 500–20,000 mg/L TDS range, with some classifications placing the upper TDS limit at 10,000 mg/L. In comparison, seawater typically contains a TDS greater than 25,000 mg/L (Ahdaba and Lienhard 2020). Desalination is considered one of the successful solutions used by mankind to treat brackish water, becoming an alternative and sustainable solution to the problem of water scarcity in the residential and industrial sectors. It has become a life-saving technology, especially in the Middle East and some North African countries, such as Libya, where there is insufficient rainfall (Khana et al. 2018). The difference in the osmotic pressure between higher TDS seawater and lower TDS brackish water translates into greater efficiency of BWRO technology compared to SWRO technology for freshwater production, the use of renewable energy sources (RES) is an attractive option for operating desalination plants using BWRO technology. Various factors such as temperature, precipitation, agricultural irrigation, etc. (Ruiz-García and Nuez 2020) can cause large fluctuations in the osmotic pressure, which in turn will impact the performance of BWRO technology.
Hydrophilic and hydrophobic materials and their applications
Published in Energy Sources, Part A: Recovery, Utilization, and Environmental Effects, 2018
Darem Ahmad, Inge van den Boogaert, Jeremey Miller, Roy Presswell, Hussam Jouhara
Ceramic materials become more popular in the application for water filtration. 70% of the earth’s surface consists of water which essentially comes from seawater and icebergs (Gleick P 1993). Only a small amount of this surface water is potable (3%) which has become a major concern as new freshwater producing techniques are required to offer a sustainable amount of freshwater (Mekonnen and Hoekstra 2016; Mukheibir 2010; Rijsberman 2006). Different techniques such as reverse osmosis (RO), electrodialysis (ED), membrane distillation (MD) and multi-stage flash distillation can be applied for the desalination of brackish and seawater. Especially MD has gotten an increased attention in the last couple of years for being a simple yet highly efficient technique. MD has shown salt rejection rates around 99–100% (Cerneaux et al. 2009; Gazagnes et al. 2007; Kujawa, Cerneaux, and Kujawski 2015a, 2015b). MD usually uses membranes made from different polymers but these do have disadvantages as they have poor thermal, mechanical and chemical stabilities, making it challenging to commercially apply them as membranes (Fang et al. 2012; Gazagnes et al. 2007; Koonaphapdeelert and Li 2007).
Three-dimensional hydrostratigraphical modelling of the regional aquifer system of the St. Maurice Delta Complex (St. Lawrence Lowlands, Canada)
Published in Canadian Water Resources Journal / Revue canadienne des ressources hydriques, 2018
Guillaume Légaré-Couture, Yves Leblanc, Michel Parent, Karine Lacasse, Stéphane Campeau
In the clay plain, the sediment cover is very thick but is almost exclusively composed of very fine-grained marine mud (silty clay) with very low permeability. The underlying till unit is more permeable than the Paleozoic bedrock by an order of magnitude, but is still not considered an aquifer. Groundwater within the sedimentary rocks below the Quaternary deposits is generally brackish. Because the rivers flowing across the plain tend to be deeply entrenched, the extent of alluvial aquifers is limited. However, the paleodeltas of the Maskinongé and Yamachiche rivers are large enough to contain significant groundwater supplies, and are used for a potable water supply by the towns of St-Édouard-de-Maskinongé, Ste-Ursule, St-Alexis-des-Monts, St-Élie-de-Caxton, Charette and St-Mathieu-du-Parc. Municipalities that are too far from the deltas are supplied by a private aqueduct network operated by the Régie d’Aqueduc de Grand-Pré, which pumps water from wells in glacial sand and gravel aquifers near St-Boniface.