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Water
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Sustainable Design for Seawater Desalination
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Sustainable Design for Seawater Desalination

A special issue of Water (ISSN 2073-4441). This special issue belongs to the section "Wastewater Treatment and Reuse".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 November 2019) | Viewed by 23918

Special Issue Editors

Dr. E. Eric Adams

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Room 48-216B, 15 Vassar St. (for overnight deliveries only), Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
Interests: Environmental fluid mechanics; dynamics of jets and plumes; water quality modeling
Dr. Adrian Wing-Keung Law

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, 50 Nanyang Avenue, Singapore 639798, Singapore
Interests: environmental hydraulics; coastal engineering; environmental technology

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Seawater desalination, either through thermal (e.g., multistage flash) or membrane (e.g., reverse osmosis) processes, has become an increasingly important contributor to the world’s freshwater supply. This is true not only for arid regions of the world such as the Middle East and North Africa, but also for semi-arid regions in which the water demand from burgeoning coastal cities has exceeded the sustainable yield under climate changes.

Desalination involves potential environmental impacts. Typical direct impacts include the entrainment and impingement of marine organisms into offshore intakes, or the exposure of organisms to constituents that have been concentrated (e.g., salt) or added through the desalination process (e.g., trace metals or waste heat). So far, many sustainable design features have been successfully developed and implemented to mitigate these impacts. For example, adopting submerged brine outfalls with multiple high-velocity discharge ports at an inclination help reduce the impact concentration, as well as combining brine with other effluents (e.g. wastewater). The use of subsurface seawater intakes and discharge wells can also provide a buffer from the ocean. Yet, ongoing concerns remain in different areas, for example, the direct impacts of mechanical stresses to marine organisms due to the discharges and modifications to the groundwater flow due to subsurface intakes, and the indirect impacts due to increased energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions caused by the power generation needed for the reverse osmosis (RO) processes. There are ongoing efforts for further improvement, for example reducing brine volume or concentration using novel technology to improve freshwater or energy recovery such as pressure-retarded osmosis, reverse or forward electrodialysis, and ion-concentration polarization.

In this Special Issue, we welcome original research, case studies, and review articles pertaining to these and related topics towards the sustainable design for seawater desalination facilities.

Dr. E. Eric Adams
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Adrian Wing-Keung Law
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Water is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Seawater
  • Desalination
  • Impingement
  • Entrainment
  • Ocean outfall
  • Salinity
  • Thermal stress
  • Mechanical stress
  • Subsurface intake
  • Intake gallery
  • Multiport diffuser

Published Papers (6 papers)

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Research

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16 pages, 4304 KiB  
Article
Scaling Reduction in Carbon Nanotube-Immobilized Membrane during Membrane Distillation
by Madihah Saud Humoud, Sagar Roy and Somenath Mitra
Water 2019, 11(12), 2588; https://doi.org/10.3390/w11122588 - 8 Dec 2019
Cited by 17 | Viewed by 3221
Abstract
Membrane distillation (MD) is fast evolving as a desalination technology for high-salinity waters where scaling remains a major challenge. This paper reports the scaling reduction in carbon nanotube-immobilized membranes (CNIMs) and by the use of the antiscalant polyacrylic acid. High concentrations of CaSO [...] Read more.
Membrane distillation (MD) is fast evolving as a desalination technology for high-salinity waters where scaling remains a major challenge. This paper reports the scaling reduction in carbon nanotube-immobilized membranes (CNIMs) and by the use of the antiscalant polyacrylic acid. High concentrations of CaSO4, CaCO3, and BaSO4 were deliberately used to initiate scaling on the membranes. It was observed that after ten hours of operation in a highly scaling CaSO4 environment, the CNIM showed 127% higher flux than what was observed on a membrane without the CNTs. The trends were similar with CaCO3 and BaSO4, where the CNIM showed significantly improved antiscaling behavior. The normalized flux declination for CNIM was found to be 45%, 30%, and 53% lower compared to the pristine membrane with CaSO4, CaCO3, and BaSO4 solutions, respectively. The use of antiscalant in the feed solution was also found to be effective in improving antiscaling behavior, which reduced salt deposition up to 28%, and the water vapor flux was 100% and 18% higher for the pristine polypropylene and CNIM, respectively. Results also showed that the presence of CNTs facilitated the removal of deposited salts by washing, and the CNIM regained 97% of its initial water flux, whereas the polypropylene only regained 85% of the original value. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Design for Seawater Desalination)
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16 pages, 2058 KiB  
Article
Cool Steam Method for Desalinating Seawater
by Pedro Antonio Arnau, Naeria Navarro, Javier Soraluce, Jose María Martínez-Iglesias, Jorge Illas and Eugenio Oñate
Water 2019, 11(11), 2385; https://doi.org/10.3390/w11112385 - 14 Nov 2019
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 3991
Abstract
Cool steam is an innovative distillation technology based on low-temperature thermal distillation (LTTD), which allows obtaining fresh water from non-safe water sources with substantially low energy consumption. LTTD consists of distilling at low temperatures by lowering the working pressure and making the most [...] Read more.
Cool steam is an innovative distillation technology based on low-temperature thermal distillation (LTTD), which allows obtaining fresh water from non-safe water sources with substantially low energy consumption. LTTD consists of distilling at low temperatures by lowering the working pressure and making the most of low-grade heat sources (either natural or artificial) to evaporate water and then condensate it at a cooler heat sink. To perform the process, an external heat source is needed that provides the latent heat of evaporation and a temperature gradient to maintain the distillation cycle. Depending on the available temperature gradient, several stages can be implemented, leading to a multi-stage device. The cool steam device can thus be single or multi-stage, being raw water fed to every stage from the top and evaporated in contact with the warmer surface within the said stage. Acting as a heat carrier, the water vapor travels to the cooler surface and condensates in contact with it. The latent heat of condensation is then conducted through the conductive wall to the next stage. Net heat flux is then established from the heat source until the heat sink, allowing distilling water inside every parallel stage. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Design for Seawater Desalination)
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14 pages, 2861 KiB  
Article
Numerical Prediction of Background Buildup of Salinity Due to Desalination Brine Discharges into the Northern Arabian Gulf
by Aaron C. Chow, Wilbert Verbruggen, Robin Morelissen, Yousef Al-Osairi, Poornima Ponnumani, Haitham M. S. Lababidi, Bader Al-Anzi and E. Eric Adams
Water 2019, 11(11), 2284; https://doi.org/10.3390/w11112284 - 31 Oct 2019
Cited by 9 | Viewed by 3798
Abstract
Brine discharges from desalination plants into low-flushing water bodies are challenging from the point of view of dilution, because of the possibility of background buildup effects that decrease the overall achievable dilution. To illustrate the background buildup effect, this paper uses the Arabian [...] Read more.
Brine discharges from desalination plants into low-flushing water bodies are challenging from the point of view of dilution, because of the possibility of background buildup effects that decrease the overall achievable dilution. To illustrate the background buildup effect, this paper uses the Arabian (Persian) Gulf, a shallow, reverse tidal estuary with only one outlet available for exchange flow. While desalination does not significantly affect the long-term average Gulf-wide salinity, due to the mitigating effect of the Indian Ocean Surface Water inflow, its resulting elevated salinities, as well as elevated concentrations of possible contaminants (such as heavy metals and organophosphates), can affect marine environments on a local and regional scale. To analyze the potential effect of background salinity buildup on dilutions achievable from discharge locations in the northern Gulf, a 3-dimensional hydrodynamic model (Delft3D) was used to simulate brine discharges from a single hypothetical source location along the Kuwaiti shoreline, about 900 km from the Strait of Hormuz. Using nested grids with a horizontal resolution, comparable to a local tidal excursion (250 m), far field dilutions of about 28 were computed for this discharge location. With this far field dilution, to achieve a total dilution of 20, the near field dilution (achievable using a submerged diffuser) would need to be increased to approximately 70. Conversely, the background build-up means that a near field dilution of 20 yields a total dilution of only about 12. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Design for Seawater Desalination)
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17 pages, 2300 KiB  
Article
Assessment of the Requirements within the Environmental Monitoring Plans Used to Evaluate the Environmental Impacts of Desalination Plants in Chile
by Iván Sola, José Luis Sánchez-Lizaso, Pamela T. Muñoz, Enzo García-Bartolomei, Claudio A. Sáez and Domingo Zarzo
Water 2019, 11(10), 2085; https://doi.org/10.3390/w11102085 - 6 Oct 2019
Cited by 24 | Viewed by 5536
Abstract
Seawater desalination represents an alternative solution to face the challenge of water scarcity in Chile. However, the uncertainty toward potential environmental impacts of desalination plants represent a barrier to achieving water sustainability and socioeconomic development in Chile. This study aimed to assess the [...] Read more.
Seawater desalination represents an alternative solution to face the challenge of water scarcity in Chile. However, the uncertainty toward potential environmental impacts of desalination plants represent a barrier to achieving water sustainability and socioeconomic development in Chile. This study aimed to assess the quality of environmental monitoring plans (EMP) and determine the aspects to be improved within it, in order to enhance the management of desalination plants during the operation phase and guarantee a sustainable development of the activity. The Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) and Environmental Impact Studies for seawater desalination projects published in the Environmental Impact Evaluation System (SEIA) in Chile between 1997 and 2018 were reviewed. The results of the brine production from desalination plants showed a significant increase in the last decade (about 1.6 Mm3 per year estimated according to the projects approved or under implementation). The EMPs data show heterogeneity and increasing requirements over time, which can be attributed to the governmental effort to improve environmental protection. Furthermore, a high frequency of irrelevant descriptors was identified in the current EMPs. The study thus recommended standardizing the environmental requirements included in EMPs based on empiric scientific knowledge to enhance the environmental protection programs in Chile. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Design for Seawater Desalination)
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14 pages, 3176 KiB  
Article
Numerical Modeling of Multiple Inclined Dense Jets Discharged from Moderately Spaced Ports
by Xiaohui Yan and Abdolmajid Mohammadian
Water 2019, 11(10), 2077; https://doi.org/10.3390/w11102077 - 5 Oct 2019
Cited by 24 | Viewed by 2916
Abstract
Wastewaters are often discharged into water bodies from multiport diffusers in the form of inclined dense jets, and it is important to predict their mixing characteristics for a sound sustainable design for seawater desalination. Compared with single jets and multiple horizontal or vertical [...] Read more.
Wastewaters are often discharged into water bodies from multiport diffusers in the form of inclined dense jets, and it is important to predict their mixing characteristics for a sound sustainable design for seawater desalination. Compared with single jets and multiple horizontal or vertical jets, the mixing processes of multiple inclined dense jets are more complicated, and thus the existing theoretical, analytical, or simplified numerical methods cannot effectively predict their dilution properties. Recent advances in numerical modeling techniques have provided a new avenue of simulating wastewater jets as three-dimensional phenomena, but their application to multiple inclined dense jets has rarely been reported. In this study, a fully three-dimensional numerical model is employed to simulate multiple inclined brine discharges from diffusers with moderately spaced ports, with the standard and re-normalization group (RNG) k-ε turbulence closures being tested. The simulated characteristic variables are compared to experimental data, and the results show that the simulations match very well with the experiments, demonstrating that the numerical model is a promising tool for simulating inclined dense jets discharged from multiport diffusers. The study also found that the RNG k-ε model performs better than the standard k-ε model without significantly increasing the computational costs. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Design for Seawater Desalination)
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Review

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32 pages, 5263 KiB  
Review
The Role of Nanofluids and Renewable Energy in the Development of Sustainable Desalination Systems: A Review
by Tejvir Singh, Muataz Ali Atieh, Tareq Al-Ansari, Abdul Wahab Mohammad and Gordon McKay
Water 2020, 12(7), 2002; https://doi.org/10.3390/w12072002 - 15 Jul 2020
Cited by 18 | Viewed by 3611
Abstract
Desalination accounts for 1% of the total global water consumption and is an energy-intensive process, with the majority of operational expenses attributed to energy consumption. Moreover, at present, a significant portion of the power comes from traditional fossil-fuel-fired power plants and the greenhouse [...] Read more.
Desalination accounts for 1% of the total global water consumption and is an energy-intensive process, with the majority of operational expenses attributed to energy consumption. Moreover, at present, a significant portion of the power comes from traditional fossil-fuel-fired power plants and the greenhouse gas emissions associated with power production along with concentrated brine discharge from the process, pose a severe threat to the environment. Due to the dramatic impact of climate change, there is a major opportunity to develop sustainable desalination processes to combat the issues of brine discharge, greenhouse gas emissions along with a reduction in energy consumption per unit of freshwater produced. Nanotechnology can play a vital role to achieve specific energy consumption reduction as nanofluids application increases the overall heat transfer coefficient enabling the production of more water for the same size desalination plant. Furthermore, concentrated brine discharge harms the marine ecosystems, and hence, this problem must also be solved to support the objective of sustainable desalination. Several studies have been carried out in the past several years in the field of nanotechnology applications for desalination, brine treatment and the role of renewable energy in desalination. This paper aims to review the major advances in this field of nanotechnology for desalination. Furthermore, a hypothesis for developing an integrated solar thermal and nanofluid sustainable desalination system, based on the cyclic economy model, is proposed. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Design for Seawater Desalination)
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