Desalination Phenomenon

Desalination as a natural phenomenon has occurred on earth for millions of years. The natural distillation cycle of water evaporating from the sea and then condensing to form pure rain water is probably the most obvious example of this phenomenon. Aristotle describes the natural water cycle as follows (Hanbury, 1993):

The sun, moving, as it does, sets up processes of change and by its agency, the finest and sweetest water is every day carried up and is dissolved into vapor and rises to the upper region, where it is condensed again by cold and so water is formed, which falls down again to earth. Salt water evaporated forms fresh, and the vapor does not when it condenses, condense into seawater again.

The other desalination phenomenon that

With the development of temperature and pressure measurements, together with an understanding of the properties of gases, land desalination began to play an important role from the early 1950’s. The expansion of oil discoveries in the Arabian Gulf countries, USA, Caribbean Island, and a few others, where drinking water is rare, also affected desalination development. The first commercial land-based seawater desalination plant was installed by the Ottomans in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. This crude distillation unit was a boiler working under atmospheric pressure, but this unit suffered from severe scale deposits and With the improvement in submerged-tube technology, the first evaporators with a total capacity in excess of 45,000 m3/d were built in Kuwait Curacao in the early

Although he held patents on the process both in Europe and the USA, he never received any financial rewarded for his work.

With this success, companies all over the world, especially in the USA and the UK, undertake extensive research and development on large flash-type evaporator units to achieve lower production cost.

The installation of similar evaporators manufactured by other contractors followed the great success of flash evaporation. Subsequently, Sasakura installed the first 5 milliongallon-per-day MSF units at Shuwaikh in Kuwait. Similar units were then installed in the new Kuwait plants located at Shuiabah. The success of these large units, proving that the MSF process could produce water economically and with greater reliability than previous systems, set the stage for the great advances in desalination capacity that were to follow in the 1970-1980’s (Temperly, 1995).

Kuwait continues to lead the field of desalination. It has gained wide experience in the design, commission, operation, and maintenance of MSF distillation plants.

Distillation was the only method available at that time. In the later 1960’s, membrane processes began to take a place in the