Sustainable Water

Desalination –
Potential for Using Renewable
Energy
Nader Al-Bastaki
Kingdom University (KU)
Sustainable Buildings and Renewables Seminar
KU and WREN
Brighton April 15-16, 2017
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 Renewable Energy and
Desalination
• Seawater is becoming a critical resource
as global freshwater supplies come under
increasing stress,
• Conventional desalination is an expensive,
energy-intensive process.
• Renewable energy offers a chance at
lowering both costs and emissions,.

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Main Water Desalination
Methods
THERMAL MEMBRANE DESALINATION
DESALINATION (Require electricity to operate
(DISTILLATION) high pressure pumps)
MSF RO (reverse osmosis)
MED and MED-VC ED or EDR
VC MD (membrane distillation)
FO (forward osmosis)

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 Sustainability of Water
Desalination
• Water desalination of sea water is the only
solution available for the region for the
provision of drinking water, due to
deterioration of ground water quality
• Thermal processes, namely MSF and
MED-VC are widely used in the GCC. In
Europe and the US, RO is mainly used
because it requires less energy.

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 i. Use of waste heat to operate
thermal processes
• The reason for the success of thermal
processes in the GCC is that it uses free energy
during the hot seasons, namely, the waste heat
from power plants. In modern power plants,
energy consumption is optimized by using the
waste heat in hot flue gases from gas turbines
that generate electricity, in generating high
pressure steam that is used to run steam turbine
electricity generators. The waste heat from
steam turbine, namely the low pressure steam
exiting the turbine, is used to heat the feed t5
seawater in thermal waster desalination.
 Use of waste heat to operate
thermal processes
• In the winter, the demand for electricity
drops and some of the electricity
generators are shut down and undergo
maintenance. Therefore, the waste heat
available for thermal water desalination is
significantly reduced. To operate the
affected desalination units, stand-by gas
combustion boilers are started. Hence, in
the winder, the advantage of free waste
heat is no longer available and the 6
 ii. Energy optimization
• Energy consumption must be optimized, by using energy
integration and recycling of energy.
• Thermal Processes:
• In thermal processes, such as MSF, this is done by using
the cold feed sea water as a coolant to condense the
vapor generated in each stage. This also results in
preheating the sea water before it enters the heating
section preceding the first stage. Thus the amount of
energy required to heat the feed sea water to the boiling
point is reduced while no external cooling medium is
needed for condensing the generated vapors.

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 RO pressure recycle
• In RO, the quantity of reject or waste, which is
about 50% of the feed assuming 50% permeate
or product. The feed is pressurized to about 70
bars. The reject’s pressure is slightly reduced
and reaches, say, 68 bars. This is a large
amount of pressure energy that should not be
wasted. In modern processes, pressure recycle
systems are used to pressurize the feed or part
of the feed, hence reducing the overall pressure
energy requireemnts by about 40 to 50%.
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 iii. Chemicals optimization
• Several types of chemicals are used for
thermal processes to reduce corrosion,
prevent fouling and prevent foaming. In
RO chemical are added to the feed water
to prevent membrane fouling and
crystallization of salts.
• These chemical stay in the concentrated
sea water after extracting the product
water and hence ae eventually dumped in
the sea. 9
 Chemicals
• These chemicals increase the operating
cost and dumping them harms the
environment.
• To make the processes more sustainable
new chemicals have been developed over
the last thirty years with higher efficiency
and the processes have been modified in
order to reduce the total amount of
chemicals needed.
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 Chemicals
• For example, in MSF, A large amount of
sea water is used to remove large
amounts of heat from the vapors in the
three heat rejection section. At the exit of
this section about 50% of this cooling
water is dumped to the sea. No chemicals
are added so far. The remaining 50% is
sent to the last stage of the flash
chambers, namely, stage 23, where it is
mixed with the brine. 11
 Chemicals
• Now part of this mixture of brine and
preheated feed is dumped to the sea and the
other part is sent to the cooling pipes of the
heat recovery section. Before entering the
cooling pipes, the chemicals are added.
Since this mixture already has part of the
chemicals that have come from the mixing
process, less chemicals will be needed.
Moreover, the mixture that is dumped to the
sea will have lower salt and chemicals
concentrations due to the mixing. 12
 iv. Better Materials of
Construction
• Inappropriate materials of construction of
MSF plants, namely, carbon steel, in the
early days when the process was
commercialized resulted in huge
maintance problems which the process
highly unsustainable due to the large and
frequent shut-down periods and large
maintenance costs. Over the years, much
better materials have been developed,
which resulted in much superior operation.13
 Materials of construction
• In RO, many developments have been
made in the membrane materials and
spacers in order to improve the turbulence
and hence reduce the fouling and
increasing the permeate flux or rate of
product.

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 v. Renewable Energy
• All the previous developments have
increased the sustainability of the
desalination processes.
• One more step that will increase the
sustainability is to use sustainable energy
sources to heat the feed seawater in
thermal processes (namely by thermal
concentrators e.g. CSPs, or mirrors) or to
generate electricity to operate the high
pressure pumps (e.g. using PV panels) 15
 Thermal methods of Water
Desalination
• MSF: Multistage Flash Distillation:
typically 20 to 23 stages, operating
temperatures of 90 oC to 110 oC
• MED : Multi-Effect Distillation:
typically 3 stages, with operating
temperatures of about 70oC
• VC: Vapor Compression:
Mechanical Vapor Compression, MVC,
Thermal Vapor Compression, TVC 16
Schematic of MSF process
Source:

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Multi-stage flash (MSF) desalination with brine circulation (El-Dessouky
and Ettouney, 2002)

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Multi-effect distillation (MED)

Source:

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Vapor Compression

Source:
Aqua-Chem http://aqua-chem.com/taxonomy/term/12 20
 Reverse Osmosis
• Reverse Osmosis, RO, is almost the only major
desalination processes that is currently used on
both large and small scale levels.
• RO is a modular system that can be used for
small applications as well as large plants.

• The Driving Force is PRESSURE (DP – Dp)

• DP is the applied pressure (60-65 atm for
seawater)
• Dp is the osmotic pressure (pF - pP) (p in atm is,
roughly, 0.8 salt concentration in kg/m3) 21
 High Pressure Pump Reverse Osmosis

60-70 bars (atms)

Feed
Sea
Water Reject
45000 (Waste)
ppm

RO membrane

Permeate
(Product 150
– 300 ppm)

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 Cleaning In Place
(CIP)

Flow diagram of Hitachi RO process

Source:
http://www.hitachi-aqt.com/products/brackish.html
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 Structure: Spiral
wound or hollow fiber

Material:
Polyamide or
Cellulose Acetate

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 Total World Reverse Osmosis by
Source (Jan Schippers, 2004)
3
Capacity (million m /d)

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Brackish water

Sea water

River water

Pure water

Waste water

Brine

Unknown
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Comparison of Energy Consumption and
pressure
  bar kwh/m3 Heat
UF/MF 0.5 - 2 0.2 -
NF 5 - 10 0.3 - 0.5 -
RO
Brackish 10 – 20 0.5 - 1 -
ED - 0.5 – 10 -
RO
Seawater 50 – 90 2 - 4 -
Distillation - 2 - 4 160 MJ/m3
UV/TiO2 4 27
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Conceptual Plan of Solar power and water generation
using MSF or MED
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Thank you

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