Abstract

As well known, the basic birthrights of human are the clean air, clean water, healthy food, and green energy. So, clean water is the second important requested need of all living organisms on Earth. To know the importance of water to our human bodies, a deficiency of just 2% in our body’s water supply indicates dehydration. Nowadays, all countries suffer from the problem of freshwater shortage. Despite the importance of clean water for our lives, only 0.01% is available as surface water such as the rivers, lakes, and swamps. These frightening facts have made it a national and humanitarian duty for scientists to research how to overcome the water problem and how to provide alternative sources of safe drinking water using renewable energies. Desalination is the most famous and operative technique used to overcome this problem. In this chapter, the different desalination techniques are reviewed and reported. Also, the solar distillation processes are mentioned with an extended review on the solar distillers. Besides, the application of artificial intelligence in improving the performance of desalination systems is reported. The main conclusions are stated at the end of this chapter.

Highlights

  • Any human being needs the water as the second most important fluid after air to be able to live on the Earth

  • Around two-thirds of the Earth is covered by water (~ 71%), but more than 7% of this water cannot be used because they are in the form of ocean, ice caps, glaciers, ground, and aquifers [1]

  • random vector functional link (RVFL) has a direct connection among the input and output nodes, which is of a substantial impact on the network performance

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Summary

Introduction

The water controls the ecosystem of any society [6, 7]. This is because the potable water shortage is a problem of both the remote and urban communities [8]. The thermal desalination processes follow the same principles of the natural hydrological cycle, but they use huge energy amounts. Distillation is accomplished by introducing saltwater into the process, which produces two output streams: one of freshwater and the other of brine water. Till 2015, the total capacity of desalinated freshwater is 86.55 million cubic meter a day, which were obtained from around 18,000 plants for desalination around the globe.

Desalination techniques
Multistage flash distillation (MSFD)
Multiple-effect distillation (MED)
Reverse osmosis (RO)
Freezing
Desalination economics
Solar distillers
Methods of improving the solar distiller performance
Solar distiller types
Single-effect distillers
Passive solar distiller
Passive distiller
ANN as a prediction method for the performance of desalination systems
Findings
Conclusions
Full Text
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