Desalination Research

There has been an exponential increase in desalination capacity both globally and nationally since 1960, fueled in part by growing concern for local water scarcity and made possible to a great extent by a major federal investment for desalination research and development. Traditional sources of supply are increasingly expensive, unavailable, or controversial, but desalination technology offers the potential to substantially reduce water scarcity by converting the almost inexhaustible supply of seawater and the apparently vast quantities of brackish groundwater into new sources of freshwater. Desalination assesses the state of the art in relevant desalination technologies, and factors such as cost and implementation challenges. It also describes reasonable long-term goals for advancing desalination technology, posits recommendations for action and research, estimates the funding necessary to support the proposed research agenda, and identifies appropriate roles for governmental and nongovernmental entities.

The Bureau of Reclamation and Sandia National Laboratories jointly developed the Roadmap to serve as a strategic research pathway for desalination and water purification technologies to meet future water needs. The book recommends that the Roadmap include a sharper focus on the research and technological advancements needed to reach the long-term objectives. The book also suggests that the environmental, economic, and social costs of energy required by increased dependence on desalination be examined. Strategies for implementing the Roadmap initiative are provided.

Desalination Technologies: Design and Operation sets the scene for desalination technologies as a long-term solution to freshwater demand by analyzing the current demand for water, available water resources and future predicted demand. The book captures recent developments in thermal desalination (multistage flash desalination, multi-effect evaporation, vapor compression), membrane desalination (forward osmosis, reverse osmosis, pressure retarded, electrodialysis, membrane distillation, ultra-, nano-, and micro-filtration), and alternative processes such as freezing and ion exchange. Both dynamic and steady state models (from short cut, simple, to detail) of various desalination processes are discussed. The book is intended for (under)graduate students in chemical engineering and postgraduate researchers and industrial practitioners in desalination. Provides the fundamentals of different desalination processes Includes desalination modeling from short and simple, to detailed and more advanced Discusses desalination optimization and synthesis to reduce environmental impact Handles thermo-physical property models and correlations Includes case studies to give a clearer understanding of desalination

As freshwater resources continue to decline as the population grows and development activities continue, desalination has taken on a sense of urgency. Desalination refers to any of several processes that remove excess salt and other minerals from water. Desalination may also refer to the removal of salts and minerals more generally, as in soil desalination. This book includes within its scope distillation, membranes, reverse osmosis, electrodialysis, ion exchange, freezing, water purification, and water reuse and wastewater treatment. This new volume examines new research in this frontier field.