Desalination Technologies

Freshwater shortages are pushing desalination toward the center of long-term water planning. The book starts by examining how much water is used today, which sources remain available, and how demand is expected to grow in the future.

Thermal methods are covered in detail, including multistage flash, multi-effect evaporation and vapor compression. Membrane approaches receive equal attention, among them forward osmosis, reverse osmosis, pressure retarded processes, electrodialysis, membrane distillation, and ultrafiltration, nanofiltration and microfiltration. Less common options such as freezing and ion exchange are also included.

Modeling is a major theme. Both dynamic and steady-state models are presented for the various desalination processes, ranging from shortcut and simple approaches to detailed and more advanced ones. The book also addresses optimization and synthesis aimed at reducing environmental impact, as well as thermophysical property models and correlations.

The fundamentals of each process are laid out, and case studies illustrate how these methods work in practice. The intended readers are undergraduate and graduate chemical engineering students, postgraduate researchers, and industry practitioners working in desalination.