Sustainable Design for Seawater Desalination

Dear Colleagues,

Seawater desalination, either through thermal (e.g., multistage flash) or membrane (e.g., reverse osmosis) processes, has become an increasingly important contributor to the world’s freshwater supply. This is true not only for arid regions of the world such as the Middle East and North Africa, but also for semi-arid regions in which the water demand from burgeoning coastal cities has exceeded the sustainable yield under climate changes.

Desalination involves potential environmental impacts. Typical direct impacts include the entrainment and impingement of marine organisms into offshore intakes, or the exposure of organisms to constituents that have been concentrated (e.g., salt) or added through the desalination process (e.g., trace metals or waste heat). So far, many sustainable design features have been successfully developed and implemented to mitigate these impacts. For example, adopting submerged brine outfalls with multiple high-velocity discharge ports at an inclination help reduce the impact concentration, as well as combining brine with other effluents (e.g. wastewater). The use of subsurface seawater intakes and discharge wells can also provide a buffer from the ocean. Yet, ongoing concerns remain in different areas, for example, the direct impacts of mechanical stresses to marine organisms due to the discharges and modifications to the groundwater flow due to subsurface intakes, and the indirect impacts due to increased energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions caused by the power generation needed for the reverse osmosis (RO) processes. There are ongoing efforts for further improvement, for example reducing brine volume or concentration using novel technology to improve freshwater or energy recovery such as pressure-retarded osmosis, reverse or forward electrodialysis, and ion-concentration polarization.

In this Special Issue, we welcome original research, case studies, and review articles pertaining to these and related topics towards the sustainable design for seawater desalination facilities.

Dr. E. Eric Adams
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Adrian Wing-Keung Law
Guest Editors

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