Innovative Fresh Water Production Process for Fossil Fuel Plants
This project concerns a diffusion driven desalination (DDD) process where warm water is evaporated into a low humidity air stream, and the vapor is condensed out to produce distilled water. Although the process has a low fresh water to feed water conversion efficiency, it has been demonstrated that this process can potentially produce low cost distilled water when driven by low grade waste heat. This report summarizes the progress made in the development and analysis of a Diffusion Driven Desalination (DDD) system. Detailed heat and mass transfer analyses required to size and analyze the diffusion tower using a heated water input are described. The analyses agree quite well with the current data and the information available in the literature. The direct contact condenser has also been thoroughly analyzed and the system performance at optimal operating conditions has been considered using a heated water/ambient air input to the diffusion tower. The diffusion tower has also been analyzed using a heated air input. The DDD laboratory facility has successfully been modified to include an air heating section. Experiments have been conducted over a range of parameters for two different cases: heated air/heated water and heated air/ambient water. A theoretical heat and mass transfer model has been examined for both of these cases and agreement between the experimental and theoretical data is good. A parametric study reveals that for every liquid mass flux there is an air mass flux value where the diffusion tower energy consumption is minimal and an air mass flux where the fresh water production flux is maximized. A study was also performed to compare the DDD process with different inlet operating conditions as well as different packing. It is shown that the heated air/heated water case is more capable of greater fresh water production with the same energy consumption than the ambient air/heated water process at high liquid mass flux. It is also shown that there can be significant advantage when using the heated air/heated water process with a less dense less specific surface area packed bed. Use of one configuration over the other depends upon the environment and the desired operating conditions.
- Research Organization:
- Univ. of Florida, Gainesville, FL (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- FG26-02NT41537
- OSTI ID:
- 918426
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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INNOVATIVE FRESH WATER PRODUCTION PROCESS FOR FOSSIL FUEL PLANTS
INNOVATIVE FRESH WATER PRODUCTION PROCESS FOR FOSSIL FUEL PLANTS