Essay On Water Desalination

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Due to the development of coastal regions in many countries, two-fifths of cities with populations of 1 million to 10 million people are located near coastlines and 14 of the largest 17 cities in the world are situated along coasts as shown in figure. Since more than 97% of the water in the world is seawater, desalination technologies have the potential to solve the freshwater crisis, particularly in coastal areas. Present conventional desalination technologies such as high pressure reverse osmosis involve expensive and energy intensive processes. A similar situation is faced when a wastewater effluent is treated with advanced technologies to produce high quality water. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a better technology that can recover water from impaired sources, providing an economic supply of fresh water to the increasing global human population. Current commercial desalination technologies such as multi-stage flash and reverse osmosis, however, consume large thermal energy (200–400 MJ/t in multi-stage flash process), or expensive electrical energy (4–6 kWh in reverse osmosis process). In this regard, forward osmosis desalination is recently drawing attention to reduce the energy consumption in desalination. There are mainly two forward osmosis…show more content…
These studies, particularly the use of primary effluent as feed for the forward osmosis process, have provided insight into the concept of using forward osmosis to avoid costly treatment of wastewater effluents in conventional treatment processes. The concentrated primary wastewater effluent can provide an opportunity for subsequent, more cost-effective wastewater treatment, including the recovery of bio-energy (bio-gas) when an anaerobic process is used to treat the concentrated feed

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