Abstract
M. Ing.
Southern Africa faces an increasingly serious shortage of potable water and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Desalination is a process whereby dissolved solids are removed out of a contaminated water source to produce potable water. However, desalination carries an unavoidable energy cost per unit of potable water produced. Minimising this energy cost is an important goal towards making desalination a practical technology for widespread use. A desalination process is proposed by the author which is based on the injection of a brine spray into vacuum conditions. Although a complete desalination process is proposed, only the core components of the desalination process are investigated in the present study. The physical processes taking place in the core components are complex.
Computational fluid dynamics is the numerical tool used to investigate the processes taking place in the core components. A commercial computational fluid dynamics code, augmented with user-programming, provides a simulation model for the core components. Due to the complexity of the investigated desalination process not all of its physical aspects are accounted for in the simulation. An analytical as opposed to experimental verification of the simulation is performed. The simulation model is used to perform a number of parametric tests. These tests are used to numerically investigate the effects of a number of process variables on the core components. The results of these parametric tests are presented and discussed