干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

Water shortage is a worldwide serious issue and of great priority. Efforts are being spent to solve this issue and propose alternatives especially in arid and semiarid countries. Along with wastewater reclamation and reuse, desalination has been adopted as a non-conventional water supply alternative in water-scarce regions. Estimates report that reliance on desalinated water is expected to grow in coming decades. However, desalination requires significant amount share of generated electricity. For the time being, most of desalination plants in the Middle East are operated using non-renewable and non-environmental friendly energy options. Hence, investigations to develop effective desalination processes powered by various sustainable energies are prioritized. Thus, a low (energy)-cost seawater desalination system and methods that operate using gravity force are proposed. In this unit, the conventional high-pressure pumps are substituted by a heavy mass (water tank) to generate the pressure needed for seawater filtration (desalination using reverse osmosis membranes), resulting in a massive reduction in the energy needed (about 90%) for this process, consequently, a remarkable lowering in the cost.