Freeze desalination of seawater using LNG cold energy

Jian Chang, Jian Zuo, Kang-Jia Lu, Neal Tai-Shung Chung

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

115 Scopus citations

Abstract

With the aid of cold energy from regasification of liquefied natural gas (LNG), freeze desalination (FD) is an emerging technology for seawater desalination because of its low energy characteristics and insensitivities to fouling problems. This work aims to investigate the major operating parameters of FD such as coolant temperature, freezing duration, supercooling, seeding, agitation, crystallizer material and subsequent washing procedure on ice production and water quality. It was found that the optimal freezing duration per batch was 1 h for an iron crystallizer and 1.5 h for a glass crystallizer. The optimal coolant temperature should be around −8 °C. The optimal amount of washing water to clean the raw ice was about 50 wt% of the raw ice. Over 50 wt% of the feed could be recovered as raw ice within 1 h, which means an overall ice recovery rate of higher than 25% (of the original seawater), considering the consumption of washing water. Both artificial and real seawater were tested under the optimized conditions. The total dissolved solid in the product ice was around 300 ppm, which met the World Health Organization (WHO) potable water salinity standard of 500 ppm. Therefore, the process parameters optimized in this study can be directly used for the freeze desalination of seawater.
Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)282-293
Number of pages12
JournalWater Research
Volume102
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 24 2016

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Water Science and Technology
  • Pollution
  • Ecological Modeling
  • Waste Management and Disposal

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