For this book, the term desalination is used in the broadest sense of the removal of dissolved, suspended, visible and invisible impurities in seawater, brackish water and wastewater, to make them drinkable, or pure enough for industrial applications like in the processes for the production of steam, power, pharmaceuticals and microelectronics, or simply for discharge back into the environment.From space, the earth is a blue planet, covered three quarters of surface by oceans and one quarter by land. Seawater contains 35 to 40 grams per liter of dissolved salts, too salty to drink or use. At any moment in time, about 0.04% of the water is in the process of being recycled through the atmosphere by the heat from the sun. Distilled water from clouds, condense as rain or snow, is falling mostly in the ocean. Only 2.5% of the Earth's total water is fresh water, but two-thirds of this water is locked away from man's use in ice caps and glaciers. The estimated one third (0.8%) of fresh water sink into the deep aquifers, or flows into lakes and rivers then to the sea.Water, being a most powerful solvent, leaches soluble salts and erodes rocks from the ground, and becomes increasingly saline and turbid before reaching the sea, or equilibrates as brackish water in the lakes and aquifers. Being the essential medium for microbial and aquatic life, it is filled with living and non-living biotic organic matter. Much of the complex suspended organic and inorganic matter in water are colloidal particles, smaller than 1 micron (1 nanometer) in size, hence invisible to naked eyes.Human needs drive the technology of desalination of water. The need is exacerbated by the mismatch of population densities with the natural distribution of available water on land. Like other basic technologies, the mountain of published information on this subject can hardly be captured in one book. Major desalination processes involve thermal evaporation known as Multi-Stage Flash Distillation (MSF), Multiple-Effect Distillation (MED) and Vapor Compression Distillation (VC). Since 1970s, technologies using semi-permeable membranes grew rapidly to compete with distillation to minimize energy consumption. Reverse Osmosis (RO) now is becoming favored over MSF even in oil-rich countries of the Persian/Arabian Gulf. Ion-exchange resins are used to soften or deionize water. Electrodialysis (ED) commercially introduced in the early 1960s also uses semi-permeable membranes. It finds greater application in industrial rather than municipal applications. Minor desalination processes include freezing, membrane distillation and solar humidification.
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PrefaceFor students and workers in the field of desalination, this book provides a summary of key concepts and keywords with which detailed information may be gathered through internet search engines. Papers and reviews collected in this volume covers the spectrum of topics in desalination of water, too broad to delve into in depth. The literature citations in these papers serve to fill in gaps in the coverage of thi...