Research on the Distillation Process for Sea Water Desalination

Dr. Shengqiang Shen, professor

Department of Power Engineering
Dalian University of Technology
Dalian 116024, China
Email: zzbshen@dlut.edu.cn
Background
Water shortage is becoming a worldwide problem and a crisis for development and
contradictory. A lot of sea side cities are in the shortage of fresh water. Sea water
desalination is one of the solutions for solving the problem in the regions near sea. There
are several methods for the desalination. The dominating methods include distillation, flash,
and reverse osmosis membrane. A focus on the desalination research is how to reduce the
cost of water production.
In industries and other occasions, there exist a lot of exhaust heat to be expelled to the
circumstance. It could be used as the zero cost energy source. The research activities on the
land based, large capacity multi-effect distillation (MED) desalination plant and the ship
based, small capacity single effect desalination plant are carried out in the laboratory of the
Institute of Energy Engineering in DUT. The purpose of the research is to investigate the
heat transfer performance and enhancement for different applications, the optimization of
flow arrangements, heat transfer surface structure and operation parameters, and the
economic analysis on the application. For the research activities, a MED plant and a singleand twin-tube horizontal falling film evaporation facility are built up and a vertical tube
rising film evaporation facility is in construction.
Contents of the study
- Observation and measurement of the distillation process of the horizontal falling
film evaporation and the vertical tube rising film evaporation
- Experimental study of the performance of the desalination plant
- Calculation of the performance of the desalination plant
- Economic analysis on the desalination process
- Optimization of the heat transfer surface structure
References
[1] A. D. Al-Ansari, I. Owen, Thermal and hydrodynamic analysis of the condensation and evaporation
processes in horizontal tube desalination plant, International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer,
42(1999) 1633-1644.
[2] F. Kafi, V. Renaudin , D. Alonso, J.M. Hornut, New MED plate desalination process: Thermal
performances. Desalination, 166(2004) 53-62.
[3] H.T. El-Dessouky, H.M. Ettouney, Fundamentals of Salt Water Desalination, Elsevier Science;
Bk&CD-Rom edition, 2002.