Design of a Cost-Effective Portable Seawater Desalination Unit for Generating Drinkable Water
1Utkarsh Kumar, 2 Vishal yadav, 3 Chandan Kumar Mandal, 4 Rahul Kumar,
1* Amar Kumar Das
1,2,3,4 B Tech Students, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Gandhi Institute For Technology (GIFT) Autonomous, Bhubaneswar.
1*Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Gandhi Institute For Technology (GIFT) Autonomous, Bhubaneswar.
Corresponding author: amar.das@gift.edu.in
Abstract
A portable seawater desalination system would be highly desirable to solve water challenges in rural areas and disaster situations. While many reverse osmosis-based portable desalination systems are already available commercially, they are not adequate for providing reliable drinking water in remote locations due to the requirement of high-pressure pumping and repeated maintenance. The current work focused on demonstrating a field-deployable desalination system with multistage membrane filtration processes, composed of two-stage ion concentration polarization, to convert seawater to drinkable water. A model is designed to be used with optimized the multistage configuration, and showed good agreement with the experimental results. The portable system desalinates seawater (2.5–45 g/L) into drinkable water (defined by WHO guideline), with the energy consumptions of 15.6–26.6 W h/L (seawater). In addition, the process can also reduce suspended solids by at least a factor of 10 from the source water, resulting in crystal clear water (<1 NTU) even from the source water with turbidity higher than 30 NTU (i.e., cloudy seawater by the tide). We built a fully integrated prototype (controller, pumps, and battery) packaged into a portable unit (42 × 33.5 × 19 cm3, 9.25 kg, and 0.33 L/h production rate) controlled by turbidity meter and IR unit. The demonstrated portable desalination system is unprecedented in size, efficiency, and operational flexibility. Therefore, it could address unique water challenges in remote, resource-limited regions of the world.
Keywords: Desalination; Freshwater production; waste energy; Reverse Osmosis.
