Principles of Desalination (Part A)

Book excerpt: Principles of Desalination, Part A, Second Edition is a collection of papers that describes the design of distillation and dual-purpose plants, what desalination can and cannot accomplish in an economical way. One paper discusses techniques toward a rapid and direct way of optimizing the economic performance of sea water conversion systems, incurring capital and continuing costs of operation (for example, transformer equipment, filtration devices, and chemical preparation). Another paper considers the general system and internal system engineering of distillation. Designing distilling plants involves the selection of process parameters, cycle determination, and calculation of water costs. The different types of evaporators are the boiling-type, the flash type, the vapor compression, the combination plant cycles, and the power plant make-up evaporators. Commercial sea water desalination plants incorporate multistage flash evaporators or multieffect vertical-tube or horizontal-tube evaporators. The problem of energy supply to these plants can be solved by a combined generation of electricity and low pressure steam. When the generation of electricity and low pressure steam are combined, the extra fuel demand for electricity generation over the fuel demand for low pressure steam generation only, is less than that for electricity generation alone. This book is suitable for economists, environmentalists, ecologists, and policy makers involved in energy conservation, agricultural development, and water management.