Article

Low-grade waste heat driven desalination technology

¹ School of Mechanical and Chemical Engineering, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Hwy, Crawley WA 6009, Australia
² School of Earth and Environment, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Hwy, Crawley WA 6009, Australia
³ School of Engineering, The University of Tasmania, Hobart TAS 7001, Australia
⁴ School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Taiyuan University of Technology, Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, P.R. China

^* e-mail: huitong.chua@uwa.edu.au

Received: 27 August 2013
Accepted: 13 November 2013

Abstract

Low-grade heat driven multi-effect distillation (MED) desalination is a very promising environmentally friendly, low emission technology. Many countries, such as Australia, are water short and conventional desalination technology is energy intensive. If a primary fossil fuel source is used, then desalination will significantly contribute to carbon dioxide emission. Low-grade waste heat from process plants and power plants generate minimal additional carbon dioxide. This source of energy is typically abundant at a temperature around 65–90 °C, which dovetails with MED technology. In this paper, we report on a new MED technology that couples perfectly with low grade waste heat to give at least a 25% freshwater yield improvement compared with conventional MED design. Typical applications and their expected improvement will also be reported.