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46 comments on Solving Our Water Problems - Desalination Using Solar Thermal Power
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46 comments on Solving Our Water Problems - Desalination Using Solar Thermal Power
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I would love to see an analysis of desalination vs water purification and reuse. That is, is it cheaper to take water from sea water, or take grey water and black water and purify it and reuse it.
Xenon is now a division of GE. they are a Canadian company who has perfected purification via membranes. Very low cost and highly effective. They got all the bad press in California with the "From Toilet to Tap" label and big negative public outcry.
The founder of Xenon is being awarded the first "water award" (i don't know the proper name - its the name of the founder of Singapore) by Singapore for his technology innovations
I'm sure I speak for several of us here when I say, I'll miss the chemical element. I don't know ... sometimes these companies seem a little ... a little high-handed.
Andrew Benedict (he was on the radio the other day).
How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?
I'm going to go out on a limb here and sans google, assert that if desalination (esp. reverse osmosis) was actually cheaper than standard water treatment procedures it would already be more widely used and the technology used instead of alum/ferric addition followed by sand filters (and maybe activated charcoal and chlorine/ozone).
I suspect that using reverse osmosis to treat grey water would take a lot less energy than treating sea water for the simple fact that sea water has 35 g/L of salt and grey water does not.
Absolutely. The pressure required to force water through the filter in reverse osmosis increases as the salinity of the inlet water increases.
If you look at this article, you will see that if the salinity doubles in the inlet water, the pressure required to overcome this also doubles. This means that the energy required per unit of filtered water increases dramatically as the salinity of the inlet water increases.
All reverse osmosis systems release the inlet water as its salinity increases and replace it with water that is less saline - despite the loss of energy of doing so. Efforts are made to recover some of this pressure energy and to pass it on to the inlet water and some suppliers claim 90% recovery of this energy. It is little like trying to recover some of the waste heat of steam turbines and to use it to warm up the inlet water before it is heated in the furnace.