Janajreh Isam, Zhang Hongtao, El Kadi Khadije, Ghaffour Noreddine
Center for Membrane and Advanced Water Technology, Khalifa University of Science and Technology, Abu Dhabi, UAE.
Center for Membrane and Advanced Water Technology, Khalifa University of Science and Technology, Abu Dhabi, UAE.
Water Res. 2023 Feb 1;229:119389. doi: 10.1016/j.watres.2022.119389. Epub 2022 Nov 19.
Desalination is the solution for water security in regions with insufficient resources. This comes at high energy cost and hence improving desalination technologies translate into huge saving. Freeze desalination (FD) is emerging as an attractive low energy and less corrosion alternative to provide the needed fresh water. The maturity of the heat driven cooling technology and solar cooling have given freeze desalination an additional momentum. This paper summarizes the latest research progress done on FD that continues to push this technology towards deployment. It gives an overview of the FD configurations and highlighting its pros and cons, presents the recent experimental work that investigate the physics of the technology, and reviews the latest high-fidelity numerical modeling of brine freezing and salt diffusion away from crystal lattice which taps on the advanced development in computational power and multiphysics integration. This enables one to identify the challenges facing FD technology and stating the prospect and foreseeable research. The finding suggests that direct and indirect FD have been evolved well while the indirect is becoming the mainstream method for risk avoidance, while vacuum freezing and eutectic freezing are still facing large obstacles in their application. For direct FD, gas hydrate combined with liquefied natural gas (LNG) regasification has been popular topics to reduce their desalination cost. Simulation and modeling development in indirect FD continue to improve the knowledge of the mechanism of ice growth and salt entrapment which are key problems that need further experimental and numerical investigations. Nonetheless, the current successful application of LNG cold energy in freeze desalination, the hybridization of FD with conventional desalination technologies, as well as ultrasound assisted freezing are promising directions for FD commercialization.
海水淡化是资源匮乏地区保障水安全的解决方案。这需要高昂的能源成本，因此改进海水淡化技术能带来巨大的节约。冷冻海水淡化（FD）正成为一种有吸引力的低能耗、低腐蚀的替代方法，以提供所需的淡水。热驱动冷却技术和太阳能冷却的成熟为冷冻海水淡化提供了额外的动力。本文总结了冷冻海水淡化方面的最新研究进展，这些进展不断推动该技术走向实际应用。文章概述了冷冻海水淡化的配置并突出其优缺点，介绍了近期研究该技术物理原理的实验工作，并回顾了关于盐水冻结和盐分从晶格扩散的最新高保真数值模拟，这些模拟利用了计算能力和多物理场集成方面的先进发展。这有助于人们识别冷冻海水淡化技术面临的挑战，并阐述其前景和可预见的研究方向。研究结果表明，直接冷冻海水淡化和间接冷冻海水淡化都有了很好的发展，而间接冷冻海水淡化正成为规避风险的主流方法，而真空冷冻和共晶冷冻在应用中仍面临巨大障碍。对于直接冷冻海水淡化，气体水合物与液化天然气（LNG）再气化相结合一直是降低其海水淡化成本的热门话题。间接冷冻海水淡化的模拟和建模发展不断增进对冰生长和盐分截留机制的认识，而这是需要进一步进行实验和数值研究的关键问题。尽管如此，目前液化天然气冷能在冷冻海水淡化中的成功应用、冷冻海水淡化与传统海水淡化技术的混合以及超声辅助冷冻都是冷冻海水淡化商业化的有前景的方向。
