Freeze water desalination

The demand of fresh water supply is exceedingly increasing due to the rapid growth of global population and economic development. With limited fresh water resources, desalination of sea water offers potential to meet the increasing water demands. Generally most current water desalination technologies are energy intensive and has high carbon footprint. This project aims to investigate the use of stored cold energy in cryofluid (liquid air, liquid nitrogen or liquid natural gas) to develop freeze desalination system. During the freezing process of sea water, salts will naturally separate as the clean ice crystals form. The work will involve developing the computational fluid dynamic modelling of the freeze desalination process and investigate the effect of the various parameters affecting the water production. The work also involves the development of a representative prototype to validate the simulation and prove the concept. A major advantage of this technology is the exploitation of cold energy stored using surplus electricity at off peak hours thus minimising cost and carbon footprint.