title: Freeze desalination of seawater using LNG cold energy.
abstract: With the aid of cold energy from regasification of liquefied natural gas (LNG), freeze desalination (FD) is an emerging technology for seawater desalination because of its low energy characteristics and insensitivities to fouling problems. This work aims to investigate the major operating parameters of FD such as coolant temperature, freezing duration, supercooling, seeding, agitation, crystallizer material and subsequent washing procedure on ice production and water quality. It was found that the optimal freezing duration per batch was 1 h for an iron crystallizer and 1.5 h for a glass crystallizer. The optimal coolant temperature should be around -8 °C. The optimal amount of washing water to clean the raw ice was about 50 wt% of the raw ice. Over 50 wt% of the feed could be recovered as raw ice within 1 h, which means an overall ice recovery rate of higher than 25% (of the original seawater), considering the consumption of washing water. Both artificial and real seawater were tested under the optimized conditions. The total dissolved solid in the product ice was around 300 ppm, which met the World Health Organization (WHO) potable water salinity standard of 500 ppm. Therefore, the process parameters optimized in this study can be directly used for the freeze desalination of seawater.
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, National University of Singapore, 4 Engineering Drive 4, 117585, Singapore.
authors.forename: Jian
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Chang
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, National University of Singapore, 4 Engineering Drive 4, 117585, Singapore.
authors.forename: Jian
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zuo
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, National University of Singapore, 4 Engineering Drive 4, 117585, Singapore.
authors.forename: Kang-Jia
authors.initials: KJ
authors.lastname: Lu
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, National University of Singapore, 4 Engineering Drive 4, 117585, Singapore; Water Desalination & Reuse (WDR) Center, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, 23955-6900, Saudi Arabia. Electronic address: chencts@nus.edu.sg.
authors.forename: Tai-Shung
authors.initials: TS
authors.lastname: Chung
mesh_terms: D003080:Cold Temperature; D005615:Freezing; D059206:Natural Gas; D054712:Salinity; D012623:Seawater; D018508:Water Purification
chemical_list: D059206:Natural Gas
keywords: Freeze desalination; LNG cold energy; Seawater desalination