International Journal of Environmental Science and Development

Abstract—It is well known that water scarcity and global warming are the two most important concerns of the 21st century. Fresh water resources are limited and while desalination can potentially provide unlimited supply of freshwater produced from infinite oceans, high energy consumption and associated environmental impacts are major drawbacks. This paper presents a practical scheme for providing freshwater by utilizing hydrostatic pressure in conjunction with wave energy. While in a typical seawater reverse osmosis plant,3 to 10 kWh of electric energy is required to produce one cubic meter of freshwater, in the proposed approach, since only the product water needs to be pumped to the surface the specific energy consumption can be reduced to 2.46 kWh.

Index Terms—Desalination, hydrostatic pressure, reverseosmosis, submerged system.

Authors are with School of Engineering, Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan, Astana, Australia (e-mail: dashtpour56@yahoo.co.uk; sal-zubaidy@nu.edu.kz).

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Cite: Reza Dashtpour and Sarim N. Al-Zubaidy, "Energy Efficient Reverse Osmosis Desalination Process," International Journal of Environmental Science and Development vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 339-345, 2012.