Critical technological review

Critical technological review








Critical Technological Review on Environmental Impact in setting up Desalination plants

Submitted By
Meenakshi Asokan

The need for fresh water is ever increasing day by day. A growth gap is formed in between supply and demand for water supply in most of the countries. The US geological survey found that 96.5% of earth’s water is located in seas and oceans and 1.7% of earth’s water is located in the ice caps [1] with only 1% of the earth’s natural resource having fresh water available for humans to consume. Taking this into account, around 780 million people still lack access to freshwater [2]. The main reason behind this is because of the limited availability of surface water, high population growth, urbanization development, deficient institutional arrangements, inadequate management practices, depletion and deterioration in water quality especially in underground aquifers and agricultural development, the ground water table depletion due to excessive pumping, fluctuating changes in weather affecting the overall rainfall volume [3]. Therefore in order to meet up the requirements of demands for fresh water in today’s world, many purification methods are to be adopted, and one such method is called desalination.

Desalination plants are set up to perform desalination on the water’s located in seas and oceans. These plants are used to convert the saline water into fresh water. It seperates the saline water into two streams. One with low concentration of dissolved salts (freshwater streams) and the other containing the remaining dissolved salts (the concentrated or brine stream). To conduct this process, an immense amount of energy is required. Hence, a power plant is established for the smooth functioning of this plant [4].
These plants adopt modern technologies for the separation of the saline water, which falls into two categories:
Distillation based on thermal methods -Multistage Flash (MSF), Multi effect Distillation (MED) or...

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