Title

Water Desalination

 

 

Ecat & Sustainable Water Desalination

 

We have a vision to build the first Ecat ‘Vacuum Assisted’ low energy Ecat desalination and water purification system.

 

 


Several technologies exist for desalination today, but most of them consume non-renewable energy sources and can contribute to environmental harm, directly or indirectly.


Ecat represents an alternative to normal (costly) reverse osmosis desalination.  Ecat Energy could be the key to feasibly create safe drinking water for every single person on the planet.

 

The energy required for this distillation process today makes it prohibitively expensive on a large scale. Using membranes, large amounts of energy are needed to generate the high pressure that forces the water through the filter. Current methods require about 14 kilowatt-hours of energy to produce 1,000 gallons of desalinated seawater.

That's why only 10-13 billion gallons of water are desalinated each day, worldwide, which is only 0.26% of the global demand. The public, politicians, and water managers continue to hope that cost-effective and environmentally safe ocean desalination will come to the rescue of water-short regions.

 

"With the revolutionary Ecat technology, we can offer the world an unlimited source of fresh water, purified from the abundant and vast oceans of salt water that surround us."

Ecat Vacuum Desalination System

A novel design using low pressure ‘Vacuum Assisted’ can be used with the Ecat thermal energy.

To dispel a common belief, it is not necessary to boil water to distill it. Simply elevating its temperature, short of boiling, will adequately increase the evaporation rate. Also a reduction of energy consumption is achieved by lowering of the boiling point under vacuum. There are many advantages of low-pressure distillation process over atmospheric pressure distillation:

  • You produce lower process temperatures under vacuum, there is a reduction in boiling points. Hence thermally sensitive substances can be processed easily.
  • Materials become more volatile under vacuum and therefore more evaporation takes place, resulting in higher production rates.

Boiling desalination has always had disadvantages. It was energy intensive, due to the elevated temperatures that would need to be achieved to bring the water up to boiling, and then there was the “energy investment” that was needed to get it past the heat of vaporization.

The main competition for boiling desalination or purification for this reason was reverse osmosis, which has its own problems—that being the cost of high pressure pumps to push the water through semipermeable membranes.

Vacuum assisted desalination is a way of getting around this problem of elevated temperatures. Water has a variable boiling point that is based upon ambient pressure. By having two vertical towers, and allow sunlight to elevate the temperature to keep it above the boiling point (typically a 10 meter height), then we can get around the need to provide massive amounts of energy to do the desalination.

Many other variants are possible to maintain the operating principle, such as the inclusion of the Ecat heating sources to enable 24/7 operation.

What we need is a source of cheap, environmentally clean energy to do the desalination. The Rossi Ecat can provide the temperature differential. We do this by the use of a heat transfer oil through the reactor, routed to a heat exchange loop inside the evaporator tank. The tank is heated above the reduced boiling point by initially pumping it down with a vacuum pump so the boiling point is slightly above the ambient temperature. After vaporization, the water vapor is routed to a heat exchanger to chill it down, condensing it back into water. That water is then pumped into a holding tank. At 3.6 cents per kilowatt hour, it will cost 50.4 cents per 1000 gallons to operate, or .0126 cents per liter.

Our Ecat Desalination Design Features:

  • Assembles multiple breakthrough concepts in water purification/desalination combining extreme energy efficiency including
  • Accurately engineered efficient partial vacuum dramatically reduces energy cost to vaporize
  • Heat Exchange option between tanks
  • Option to generate vacuum with super-efficient Tesla Turbine
  • And more!
  • Sign our NDA and lets get started on building the worlds first cost effective-super efficient Ecat Desalination System

Using a uniquely designed Tesla Pump

One other attractive variant is one in which both vertical towers are eliminated, due to space constraints or aesthetics. This one is a bit more high-tech, in that it requires a vacuum pump to get the pressure down initially between the two tanks, and a “blower” in the form of a Tesla pump that creates a pressure differential between the evaporator and condenser tanks.

We also currently have a R&D project to build a tesla pump!

Background

Due to the growing world population, global warming and a decrease in water supply, it is estimated that over the next 15 years there will be a 35% shortage in consumable water.

Roughly 1.5 billion people, more than 22% of the world's population lack safe drinking water. The International Water Management Institute estimates 33% of the world's population will live in countries with water scarcity by 2025. That simply means that in less than 20 years, we won't be able to pretend water shortages are only confined to the Third World. In fact, there are already plenty of developed countries where water is too scarce to satisfy the needs of the population.

After three years of dry winters, California's reservoirs are at their lowest levels since 1992. And over half the state's land area is currently under drought conditions. At the time of writing this Texas is experiencing is worst drought in 20 years. For the first time in 15 years, Los Angeles is being forced to ration water. Africa and Australia are constantly under the threat of draughts

Drought conditions are persistent all over the world! Syria suffered from a 3 year drought that was the cause and beginning of their civil war.

It's a function of rising population and demand. There are perpetually more people who constantly want more water. And soon, their won't be enough water to supply us all. Demand for energy drives demand for more water, and demand for more water drives demand for more energy. It's a never-ending spiral.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), increasing the access to clean water is essential to:

  • Reduce water-related diseases
  • Improve the well-being of a large part of the world's population
  • Sustain economic development in developed and
    • developing countries
  • Alleviate poverty

According to the UN:

  • 20% of the world's population faces
    • water shortages today. This number is expected to rise to 50% of the world's population in 50 years.
  • 1 in 6 people worldwide do not have daily access to potable freshwater.
  • 1.6 million people die every year from drinking contaminated water.

Desalination

Desalination is the removal of salt and impurities from groundwater or seawater to produce fresh drinking water.

The process of desalination by distillation - heating water, leaving the salt and impurities behind, and condensing fresh water from the vapor or steam, has been used for thousands of years. Back in the 4th century BC, Aristotle imagined using successive filters to remove the salt from seawater. But the first actual practice of desalination involved collecting the freshwater steam from boiling saltwater. Around 200 AD, sailors began desalinating seawater with simple boilers on their ships.

Since the 1950s, researchers have been developing membranes that could filter out salt, a technique, called "reverse osmosis," In the last twenty years, seawater reverse-osmosis has matured into a viable alternative to thermal desalination. Reverse Osmosis is simply a filtering process. Seawater is pumped into the desalination plant from the ocean and passes through two levels of initial filtration to remove most of the large and small particles and impurities. The filtered seawater then enters the reverse osmosis plant. Here, it is forced under pressure through special membranes that act like microscopic strainers. The pores in the membranes are so tiny that bacteria, viruses and other impurities and the salt — are left behind as fresh water flows through.

Around 40% of the water that goes through the desalination plant comes out as fresh drinking water.

Vacuum Assisted and Low-temperature thermal desalination (LTTD) is a desalination technique takes advantage of the fact that water boils at low pressures, even as low as ambient temperature. The system uses vacuum pumps to create a low pressure, low-temperature environment in which water boils at a temperature gradient of 8 to 10 °C between two volumes of water. This process may also take advantage of the temperature gradient available at power plants, where large quantities of warm waste water are discharged from the plant, reducing the energy input needed to create a temperature gradient.

It has recently been discovered that Archimedes placed two clay pipes on which were mounted jugs, one colored black for the boiling side, and another white for the condenser, with a line connecting the two for water vapor to flow from one to the other. This principle has been tested recently, with a paper from Elsevier showing all the data on the proof of concept.

The Marketplace

According to an industry report, “The desalination market will generate expenditure in the region of $95 billion by 2018.” Of course, that means the desalination industry has huge potential for growth. Global conglomerates have quickly entered this high-profit industry. Coca Cola, GE (NYSE: GE), Siemens (NYSE: SI), and Dow Chemical (NYSE: DOW) each have a big stake in the business, with operating plants all over the world. Firms like T. Rowe Price, Vanguard, and Berkshire Hathaway are watching the desalination technology — because currently all of these companies use old costly methods.

It takes about 14 kilowatt-hours of energy to desalinate 1,000 gallons of seawater. Keep in mind the average American uses between 80 to 100 gallons every day...So, satisfying the country's demand with desalination would require 100 extra electric power plants... each with a gigawatt of capacity.

  • It takes as much as 2 billion gallons of water per day to refine just 800 million gallons of petroleum products…
  • Oil shale extraction uses about 5 barrels of water for every one barrel of oil produced…
  • 800 gallons of water are required to generate one megawatt-hour of electricity…
  • Nuclear plants suck up more than 33 million gallons of water each day for cooling purposes...
  • And a typical 500-megawatt coal power plant uses up about 2.2 billion gallons of water each year — enough to support a city of 250,000 people.

Conclusion

Desalination is process primarily done in developed countries with enough money and resources. If technology continues to produce new methods and better solutions to the issues that exist today, there would be a whole new water resource for more and more countries that are facing drought, competition for water, and overpopulation.

The Ecat desalination system is a technology that is worthy of further development. It is “green” in that it is environmentally friendly, ecologically responsible, and sustainable due to it’s reduced energy consumption.

What difference does cheap energy and cheap water make? Consider this. If you reduced the cost of water desalination and transport so as to make desert farming profitable 1000 miles from a sea coast, you could turn the worlds deserts green. That would in crease the habitable size of the USA by 1/2, China by 1/3, double the habitable size of Africa, triple the habitable size of Mexico, increase by 100 fold the habitable size of Australia, increase by a third the habitable size of central Asia and double the size of the habitable earth.

Further details on agricultural applications can be seen at our pages on www.BloomtheDesert.com

Ecat and Agriculture and Ecat and Future cities
Investment enquires Roger Green Ecat@earthlink.net

 

 

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