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Water treatment Industry

RANUM7

Hello Everyone!

I am very happy to finaly find a community like this, I'm from Philippines by the way anyone here my Fellow countrymen?. I been wondering if there is a fellow Engineer here been working on a water distillation equipment in industrial scale or prototype that could share some insights before i proceed with creation of  a device in my mind setting for years now?

I'm quite aware that water purification through distillation is rather a slow process against pressurized configuration (pressurized bulk filtration). Distillation is ideally achieved by  rate of evaporization and Thermodynamics would definetely determine the effeciency of once device.

1.If we would configure a distillation system subjected to constant negative pressure so that energy required to evaporate the water would be significantly lower?  

2. All surface subjected to heat and in contact with water will get scale from water impurities and would eventually affect the device effeciency. Could we make a heating media inside a negative pressure chamber so we could agitate this to descale?

3. A magnetic induction coil will heat the heating media so that unlike heating element similar to convensional electric kettle could be disturbed anytime for discalling?

Hope somebody would help me figure this out..

Salamat po!

RANUM7

  • Welcome to element14.

    There are a number of ways to distill water, most of them are rather energy intensive.

    If you have a good source of water, I would set up a solar cell based system to pull the Hydrogen and Oxygen out using electrolysis.

    You can then just burn the two gases to produce absolutely pure water.

    Plus you can use the heat generated to run another still to generate pure water from the salt water.

  • Good ideas.  The vacuum distillation (item 1.) will lower the vaporization temperature of the water, which will reduce the creation of scale (item 2.) at the heating surfaces.  A magnetic induction coil (item 3.) may be more controllable, but you still need to reach a certain temperature to vaporize the water, so the scale will still form.

  • in reply to DAB

    Thank you sir!

    Yes that is a brilliant idea, Electrolysis of  water unit will increase effeciency if we would make this idea work. 

    Hoever scalling issue would be problematic it will difinetely inhibit heat transfer on the heating vessel. 

    So a heating media would be my option so that it could be agitated like regeneration procedure applied to sand filter bed, so the scale could then be flush via drain port.

  • in reply to mp2100

    Yes sir!

    The idea is to configure the induction coil so that it will be located outside the vacuum chamber, idealy heating media should be in direct contact with water and also to increase the effeciency of evaporazation surface area is the key.

    Do magnetite respond to magnetic induction? I've had tested metalic materials on a conventional induction stove, I hadn't achieved heating. the induction coil has to be designed oscilate more so that a magnetic metal would induce eddy current ang eventually heat up.

    Also induction rated cookware are noticeably thin, and surface area has to be significant to achieve instant heating. So i assume breaking the heating surface to fine pieces would increase heating effeciency due to better surface area if thise would be directly in contact with water.

  • Is there any chance that microwaves could be used in an industrial unit. This would heat the water directly and there would be no hot metal to accumulate scale. The water itself of course would become more highly concentrated with impurities and would need to be flushed out.

  • in reply to jw0752

    Yes sir!

    I will consider the accomulated particle to be flushed out, so water will not get concentrated with dissolved solids like calcium, magnesium, chloride, silica etc.

    Yes microwave do heat up water, but I'm afraid this would alter the molecular composition of water and would not be good for drinking application. On industrial scale however this would we interesting idea, this would be alternative to fission reactor aplicable for power generation.

    Also a microwave reactor should be calibrated not to exceed the water dissociation frequency otherwise it will be untable and ignite.