The energy balance within a bubble column evaporator

Abstract

Bubble column evaporator (BCE) systems have been studied and developed for many applications, such as thermal desalination, sterilization, evaporative cooling and controlled precipitation. The heat supplied from warm/hot dry bubbles is to vaporize the water in various salt solutions until the solution temperature reaches steady state, which was derived into the energy balance of the BCE. The energy balance and utilization involved in each BCE process form the fundamental theory of these applications. More importantly, it opened a new field for the thermodynamics study in the form of heat and vapor transfer in the bubbles. In this paper, the originally derived energy balance was reviewed on the basis of its physics in the BCE process and compared with new proposed energy balance equations in terms of obtained the enthalpy of vaporization (ΔH vap) values of salt solutions from BCE experiments. Based on the analysis of derivation and ΔH vap values comparison, it is demonstrated that the original balance equation has high accuracy and precision, within 2% over 19–55 °C using improved systems. Also, the experimental and theoretical techniques used for determining ΔH vap values of salt solutions were reviewed for the operation conditions and their accuracies compared to the literature data. The BCE method, as one of the most simple and accurate techniques, offers a novel way to determine ΔH vap values of salt solutions based on its energy balance equation, which had error less than 3%. The thermal energy required to heat the inlet gas, the energy used for water evaporation in the BCE and the energy conserved from water vapor condensation were estimated in an overall energy balance analysis. The good agreement observed between input and potential vapor condensation energy illustrates the efficiency of the BCE system. Typical energy consumption levels for thermal desalination for producing pure water using the BCE process was also analyzed for different inlet air temperatures, and indicated the better energy efficiency, of 7.55 kW·h per m3 of pure water, compared to traditional thermal desalination techniques.