Desalination Literature Review

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LITERATURE REVIEW: Introduction: Water around the world is used in three main fields: Industry, agriculture and domestic use. Each of these fields requires the water to be meeting certain standards. These standards include the water's pH, organic content, turbidity, heavy metal content, salinity, etc. As shown in Figure 1 less than three percent of the water around the water is fresh water; on the other hand, more than 95% of the water around the world exists in oceans. Sea water is more abundant than fresh water which is becoming depleted due to human consumption and evaporation due to global warming; this makes it a good choice to turn to for countries and cities that have no or limited freshwater sources. On average, the water salinity in sea water is 35 ppt. which is much more saline than fresh water which is around 0.5 ppt. in salinity. This causes an issue that needs to be addressed. Since the salinity of the seawater is very high for human activities it has to be lowered before it is used. This is where desalination becomes useful. Desalination is a general term used to describe the removal…show more content…
In the 1950s, the first seawater distillation plants were built. In the 1960s, Kuwait introduced the first industrial desalination plant. Later, membranes started entering into the market of desalination. The first successful Reverse Osmosis (RO) plant for treating brackish water was opened in the late 1960s. During the decade that followed, improvements in the material of membranes enhanced the permeability of the membranes and the RO membranes were used in the process of seawater desalination. Recently, huge improvements in the RO membranes technology made RO to be the first choice for newly designed desalination plants. Nowadays, over 15,000 operating desalination plants exist around the world. Almost fifty percent of the existing desalination plants are RO

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