Experimental Study of a Brackish Water Desalination Plant

Abstract

Water desalination is crucial for addressing global water scarcity affecting over 2 billion people. By 2050, water demand could rise by 20-30% due to population growth and urbanization. Currently, over 40% of the global population lacks access to clean water due to overexploitation of conventional sources like rivers and groundwater. This report focuses on experimental analysis of brackish water desalination, primarily using reverse osmosis (RO). Desalination plays a vital role in converting seawater or brackish water into drinkable water, especially in coastal areas. The study explores various desalination methods such as ion exchange, membrane distillation, and vapor compression distillation. Technological advancements, particularly in RO distillation process has enhanced efficiency and sustainability. In this report, pre-treatment processes, including filtration, chemical dosing, antiscalant injection, water softening, are also employed to remove contaminants before desalination. The performance of RO is evaluated based on factors like pressure drop, feed flow rate, and recovery ratio, analyzing water flux, salt rejection rate, energy consumption, and system efficiency. The results provide insights into optimizing brackish water desalination and the discussions are carried out for improvement of the ways such as post treatment, membrane cleaning and advancement in membrane materials for sustainable freshwater production.

Keywords

• Water desalination
• Brackish water
• Reverse osmosis
• Multistage, ion exchange
• Recovery ratio
• Flux