Innovative Fresh Water Production Process for Fossil Fuel Plants Annual Report: 2005 (open access)

Innovative Fresh Water Production Process for Fossil Fuel Plants Annual Report: 2005

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 describes the annual progress made in the development and analysis of a Diffusion Driven Desalination (DDD) system. A dynamic analysis of heat and mass transfer demonstrates that the DDD process can yield a fresh water production of 1.03 million gallon/day by utilizing waste heat from a 100 MW steam power plant based on a condensing steam pressure of only 3 Hg. The optimum operating condition for the DDD process with a high temperature of 50 C and sink temperature of 25 C has an air mass flux of 1.5 kg/m{sup 2}-s, air to feed water mass flow ratio of 1 in the diffusion tower, and a fresh water to air mass flow ratio of 2 in the condenser. Operating at these conditions yields a fresh water production efficiency (m{sub fW}/m{sub L}) of 0.031 and …
Date: September 1, 2005
Creator: Klausner, James F.; Mei, Renwei; Li, Yi; Knight, Jessica & Jogi, Venugopal
System: The UNT Digital Library