Desalination - Breaking Down the Myth of Feasibility

a reply to: markosity1973

You first, ill develope whatever device i need to survive

we are killing off ALL the trees!
did you know that trees are 50% water or more?
the land use't to be coverd in trees.
dont forget they give us the air we breath to.

originally posted by: buddha
we are killing off ALL the trees!
did you know that trees are 50% water or more?
the land use't to be coverd in trees.
dont forget they give us the air we breath to.

I think someday humanity will actually irrigate forests in times of climate change and drought, and replant our rain forests. I hope I am right, because if I am not I think we can stop using the term humanity and just call ourselves a plague.

One project the Israelis did was to grow crops in greenhouses with sea water.

They flooded the floor of the greenhouse with sea water and the heat caused evaporation that condensed on the inside of the plastic of the greenhouse and ran into the crop trays as fresh water.

originally posted by: Oannes
The easiest way to desalinate water is to distill/boil it. I never understood why it was considered to be difficult.

You are missing a few steps here.
If you boil it, you have to collect the steam; let it condensate; funnel the condensate to a collection place; check for hazards, and possibly treat for hazards; and process out of that collection.
Meanwhile you have to take out the residue left in the tanks from the boiling process (not just salt), and clean and sterilize the tanks.
You also have to dispose of the residue (once again not just salt). If you are planning to utilize the salt, you again will have to refine and sterilize the residue to get to a safe point of sale.

This is simplified. Do you see the difficulty now?

a reply to: ANNED

One project the Israelis did was to grow crops in greenhouses with sea water. They flooded the floor of the greenhouse with sea water and the heat caused evaporation that condensed on the inside of the plastic of the greenhouse and ran into the crop trays as fresh water.

That's a pretty cool idea. Kind of like a terrarium.

-dex

a reply to: randomtangentsrme

check for hazards, and possibly treat for hazards; and process out of that collection.

I would view this project as coarse water extraction. Any customers interested in utilizing this water would have to perform their own water purification. There is some infrastructure in place to filter out impurities from naturally available water sources. Presumably those treatment facilities could be upgraded or modified to further refine the water extracted in this part of the process.

You also have to dispose of the residue (once again not just salt). If you are planning to utilize the salt, you again will have to refine and sterilize the residue to get to a safe point of sale.

Based on some quick research that I did, I would think the brine residue could be used by industry as feed stock. Currently some of these feed stocks come from water extraction of subterranean salt domes like the one that collapsed and created the situation in Bayou Corne. Since these so-called salt domes are the product of ancient evaporated seas, I would think that the chemical composition would be similar to our current ocean.

and clean and sterilize the tanks.

How much more sterilization would be required that is already used in potable water processing and distribution systems?

I think the idea is to create water that is relatively salt free. Beyond that, any other processing is basically out-of-scope.


-dex

Manoj Bhargave the 5 hour energy shot billionaire has pledged to donate most of his makings to improve the lives of the poor.
He has a well funded experiment workshop and one of his projects is water production through a desalination system.
Worth to watch this youtube video for interest its only a 3.18 minute take.




en.wikipedia.org...

a reply to: skywatcher44

I love this guy. I've read a little about him, thanks for the videos.

I think that we will need actual land based desalination, because I think we need to remove the byproducts from the water or we could potentially damage the ocean by artificially raising the salinity and ocean PH.

But those barges seem like a great idea for localized needs. Maybe before we rush to build desalination due to temporary drought situations we keep a fleet of 1000 barges for a global temporary solution to droughts or other temporary factors.