Multiple Stage Flash Distillation (MSF)
Multiple Stage Flash Distillation is one of the predominant conventional phase change methods of achieving desalination. It accounts for roughly 45% of the total world desalination capacity and 93% of all thermal methods.
Solar derivatives have been studied and in some cases implemented in small and medium scale plants around the world. In Margarita de Savoya, Italy there is a 50-60 m3/d MSF plant with a salinity gradient solar pond providing its thermal energy and storage capacity. In El Paso, Texas there is a similar project in operation that produces 19 m3/d. In Kuwait a MSF facility has been built using parabolic trough collectors to provide the necessary solar thermal energy to produce 100 m3 of fresh water a day. And in Northern China there is an experimental, automatic, unmanned operation that uses 80 m2 of vacuum tube solar collectors coupled with a 1 kW wind turbine (to drive several small pumps) to produce 0.8 m3/d.
Production data shows that MSF solar distillation has an output capacity of 6-60 L/m2/d versus the 3-4 L/m2/d standard output of a solar still. MSF experience very poor efficiency during start up or low energy periods. In order to achieve the highest efficiency MSF requires carefully controlled pressure drops across each stage and a steady energy input. As a result, solar applications require some form of thermal energy storage to deal with cloud interference, varying solar patterns, night time operation, and seasonal changes in ambient air temperature. As thermal energy storage capacity increases a more continuous process can be achieved and production rates approach maximum efficiency.
Read more about this topic: Solar Desalination
Famous quotes containing the words multiple, stage, flash and/or distillation:
“There is a continual exchange of ideas between all minds of a generation. Journalists, popular novelists, illustrators, and cartoonists adapt the truths discovered by the powerful intellects for the multitude. It is like a spiritual flood, like a gush that pours into multiple cascades until it forms the great moving sheet of water that stands for the mentality of a period.”
—Auguste Rodin (1849–1917)
“If any proof were needed of the progress of the cause for which I have worked, it is here tonight. The presence on the stage of these college women, and in the audience of all those college girls who will some day be the nation’s greatest strength, will tell their own story to the world.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)
“The legislator must be in advance of his age.
Across the mind of the statesman flash ever and anon the brilliant, though partial, intimations of future events.... Something which is more than fore-sight and less than prophetic knowledge marks the statesman a peculiar being among his contemporaries.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It’s the drowning out of false voices.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)