Thermal desalination process based on self-heat recuperation

The demand for pure water has been increasing recently. To meet the requirement, desalination technology is receiving more attention. Thermal and membrane processes are widely used. Thermal desalination has the superior characteristics. However due to the large energy consumption, most newly constructed process is based on membrane desalination. Recently a novel self-heat recuperation technology has been proposed. In the self-heat recuperation process, both sensible heat and latent heat are circulated by compression work. Energy consumption is thereby drastically reduced. In this paper, we applied this technology to desalination process. It was reveal that the operation condition where small temperature difference in heat exchanger and/or large recovery ratio makes it possible to reduce the energy required for the proposed thermal desalination comparable to that of RO desalination.