The use of seawater for drinking purposes differs from the traditional way of collecting drinking water. The salt in the seawater needs to be removed and there are two main techniques for doing so.
Depending on the quality of the desalinated water many different techniques can be used to purify the drinking water to the quality level accepted in that particular area. Therefore we have chosen to show several ways of purifying the desalinated water, which is very similar to the surface water processes.
Seawater desalination is a method for the production of pure water that is being applied more and more. Desalination is performed by only a few commercially competitive processes: reverse osmosis (RO) as a membrane process, and the thermal processes multi stage flash (MSF) evaporation and multiple effect (ME) evaporation. The ME process is widely combined with thermal vapor compression (ME-TVC), mostly performed by steam ejectors. A few (smaller) installations use a mechanical compressor (ME-MVC), thus consuming only electrical energy for the drive.