Chapter 2: Review of Related Literatures

Water is a vital resource for human being's life. However, freshwater resources are a
scarce resource with only 0.75% of the total water on earth readily available for human use, and
97.5% as saline water, while 7.75% are snow caps and glaciers [1]. Desalination has been
developed as an alternate or nonconventional water supply to resolve the challenge of limited
freshwater supplies, utilizing the massively available saline water resources [2]. The global
annual desalination capacity is 38 billion cubic meters (BCM/yr), or 95 million cubic meter/day
(MCM/d) as of 2018, consuming 75.2 TWh annually [3, 4]. Since July 2018, around 400
desalination projects were contracted worldwide. The capacity of the desalination projects
contracted in the first half of 2019 was approximately 4 million m3/d, which is equivalent to the
total of both the years of 2015 and 2016 [27]. Seawater desalination SWD accounts for 61%,
brackish water desalination accounts for 21%, with the rest for river water and wastewater [4].
This is almost double the capacity of 44.1 MCM/d in 2006, with forecast to reach 54 BCM/yr by
2030, which is almost another 42% increase [3,5].Desalination processes can be either
classified according to feed water type, i.e., seawater desalination (SWD), brackish water
desalination (BWD), river water desalination (RWD), or wastewater desalination (WWD). Type
of separation processes used, i.e., thermal desalination or membrane desalination, or other
such as capacitive deionization (CDI). Desalination technologies can be classified as well
according to the energy used to drive the process, i.e., thermal, mechanical, or electrical, as
shown in Fig. 1 below [6].
 Thermal desalination by multistage flash distillation (MSF) and multi-effect distillation (MED)
was dominating the desalination market before the 1980s, accounting for 84% of the
desalination capacity, which dropped to 50% by the 1990–2000s, and further down to 25% by
2019, with shares of 18% for MSF and 7% for MED [4]. Thermal desalination was the viable
technology before developing membrane desalination technology and still serves well for
feedwater with high salinity and temperature, and lower quality in general, and where the energy
cost is less [7]. Yet, the drawback of thermal desalination processes is the high energy
consumption, mainly thermal energy demand. The specific energy consumption (i.e., energy
consumption per m3 product water (PW)) amounts to 3.5 kWh and 12 kWh for MSF operates at
> 110 ○C and 1.5 kWh and 6 kWh for MED at < 70 ○C for electrical and thermal specific energy
consumption respectively [8]. MSF, MED, and thermal vapor compression (TCV) are considered
vaporization-based thermally-driven processes, in which the natural water cycle is mimicked
through evaporation/condensation coupling. However, this required huge thermal energy
demand to provide both sensible and latent heats from ambient temperature up to boiling
temperature, and then latent heat to vaporize a portion of water to be produced. TCV is usually
combined with MSF and MED to increase energy efficiency and desalination productivity [9].
While other low temperature evaporation-based thermal processes, which are less energy
demanding as boiling is not involved, such as membrane distillation (MD) [10], humidification
dehumidification (HDH) [11], and adsorption desalination (AD) [12]. Another unique thermal
process is the freeze desalination (FD) in which heat is extracted, i.e., cold energy is receiving
more attention recently, which is associated with expansion in the liquefied natural gas industry
[13]. Increased energy cost and environmental awareness of the downsides of utilizing fossil
fuels, as well as developments in membrane science, have favored the expansion of membrane
desalination overtaking thermal desalination [14]. Membrane desalination in general, and
reverse osmosis (RO), in particular, are favored because of the lower energy consumption,
capacity flexibility, and applicability for broadening the range of feedwater salinity [15].
Membrane desalination generally can be viewed as a pressure-driven filtration process, where a
semi-permeable membrane allows water to permeate, but not solutes [7]. The membrane
processes vary from each other, according to the level of solute rejection, with RO owns the
highest solute rejection followed by nanofiltration (NF). Over the last few decades, RO has
received substantial improvements, resulting in even lower desalination cost and energy
consumption [16]. The primary RO membrane distinctive is being permeable to water and
impermeable to solutes such as charged and uncharged constitutes, with a rejection of 99.5%
[14,17]. RO is mechanically-driven processes, where hydraulic pressure is applied to overcome
the osmotic pressure of feedwater. Consequently, it differs significantly from 15 to 25 bar for
BWD to 60–80 bar for SWD [7,18]. RO desalination accounts for 69% of global desalination
capacity from 13,500 desalination plants, and accounts for 95% of membrane desalination
capacity, with 5% for NF, which works similarly to RO, but at lower pressure, and mainly for
brackish groundwater desalination [4]. The energy demand for membrane desalination is
generally less than that of thermal desalination and differs depending on the feedwater, i.e.,
BWD or SWD. Seawater RO (SWRO) has a higher energy demand as it works at higher
pressures, with energy consumption in the range of 2–7 kWh/m3 , while BWD has lower energy
demand of 0.4–3 kWh/m3 [19,20]. Another mechanically-driven process is mechanical vapor
compression (MVC), which is used with thermally driven processes to enhance energy
efficiency [21]. Electrically-driven desalination processes are utilized to less extent with
electrodialysis /electrodialysis reversal (ED/EDR) and capacitive ionization (CDI) as the main
processes [22]. ED/EDR holds almost 1% of the global desalination capacity, mainly for low
salinity brackish water desalination [4]. The main challenges with ED/EDR and CDI electrically-
driven processes are the relatively higher energy demand, and hence cost, which excited the
research and development (R&D) for new high-efficiency electrode materials [23–25]

Desalination is currently considered as a reliable nonconventional freshwater supply, which

has been practiced on a large scale for many decades. Nevertheless, desalination is generally
the most energy-intensive and costly water treatment process. The current desalination capacity
of 38 billion cubic meters per day (BCM/d), consuming energy of almost 75 TWh. Fossil fuel,
such as coal, oil, and gas, is the primary energy source to drive different desalination processes
for both thermal and electrical energy demand. However, the extensive use of fossil fuel has
been related to global warming and climate change, hence raised many calls to reduce its
consumption, develop high-efficiency energy processes, and better utilization of fuel and
energy. It has been estimated that 20–50% of the energy used globally is wasted as heat; thus,
it represents a good opportunity for energy recovery, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Waste
heat (WH) has a high potential to fully or partially drive different desalination processes either as
heat or after recovery and conversion into electrical or mechanical energy forms. This review is
the first of its type to discuss the effort in utilizing WH in desalination processes and its recent
advances. The review discusses the WH sources and types, as well as recovery systems
relative to their utilization in desalination processes. Then the different desalination processes
relative to their potential to be driven by WH utilization are thoroughly discussed, with focus is
being given to emerging desalination due to the many benefits driving their development. It was
found that WH has successfully been used to drive different desalination processes, with the
main effort given to the direct utilization of heat to drive different thermally-driven desalination
processes. The utilization of WH has proven to bring significant economic and environmental
benefits hence lowering desalination cost and associated greenhouse gases (GHGs) emissions.
Other mechanically-driven, and electrically-driven processes, can be found in the contexts of
waste-to-power energy recovery systems, which can be later used to drive such processes.
Although WH has been successfully employed for desalination, we conclude that still more
efforts need for research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) in this field, which should be
addressed in the near future as it presents a good opportunity to secure energy supply for
increasing water demand.[26]
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