this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
9 points (100.0% liked)
Civil Engineering
119 readers
1 users here now
A community for discussion of Civil Engineering and any of its sub-disciplines, including but not limited to:
-Structural Engineering
-Geotechnical Engineering
-Environmental Engineering
-Transportation Engineering
-Construction Management
-Water Resources Engineering
-Surveying
The intent is to create an open and welcoming community from prospective students and enthusiasts, to Professional Engineers, researchers, and others working in the field.
Rules:
-Maintain civility and treat others with respect.
-Posts should be more-or-less directly related to Engineering.
-Humour is very welcome, just please refrain from low effort memes or posts that do not foster discussion.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Brady does a good job breaking down why RO desalination is energetically and operationally much better than traditional distillation. Only thing I didn't like that much was his discussion of salinity concentrations, as I feel like he built it down by defining what ppt meant relative to percentages, while I think that it being shown to the relative amounts of other dissolved solids like iron and hardness would show that sea water is an order of magnitude more laden with the dissolved solids. To me that is why RO membranes are absolutely miraculous despite the high energy requirements, because they can produce high quality fresh water from differing source water without there being much difference in each treatment process in the end. Running seawater through RO for desalination, versus well water removing hardness and nitrates would mainly differ on the pretreatment to remove suspended solids and then the proportion of reject water to permeate.