Global Desalination Project

Dana W. Paxson Dana W. Paxson 2008

Introduction The need for life-supporting water worldwide is growing much faster than the ability to supply it. We need to find ways to tap seawater supplies cheaply and quickly to meet the demand. This paper outlines a proposal for doing so. It is not traditional or existing technology, and parts of it will be achievable well before others, but we can't wait to have everything in place before we start. If some of the steps in this proposal seem impossible or uneconomical, consider powered space flight and what has been done with that, and by way of contrast think of what is at stake here. As the fresh water dries up, we also face grave deficits in clean energy supplies, coupled with the inexorable conversion of vast land areas into desert or arid waste. We also suffer from heavilypolluted sources of water now, and lack the means to replenish them. We can't afford to use massive amounts of non-renewable energy and polluting energy to make this project happen. At the outset we may be forced to use what we have, but our goal is to reduce that dependence along the way to the minimum possible. By the time we are supplying the world with its freshwater needs, we should be doing it with completely renewable solar energy.

Scope There are deserts everywhere in the hotter regions of the world, even in those regions termed temperate. These deserts receive overabundant sunshine. Currently it simply goes to waste. Every country on the planet can benefit from the purification and pumping of fresh water using the currently-wasted energy. We have thousands, even millions, of fine minds and hands available to meet the challenges of providing fresh water and energy to the world's population. If we start now, we can explore the possibilities, find the best of them, and build and improve our methods of delivery of the needed water. Everything proposed here should be seen as a first step among many other attempts, but in the end we will be doing these things everywhere, not just for our survival, but also for our prosperity and health. Although the startup costs are significant and the false starts likely to be many, the end result will transcend expectations, and transform the planet from a tragic waste into an abundant garden.

Vision Here's the way it should all appear when it is finished. Starting at the ocean shorelines and leading into desert areas, lines of distillation units many meters tall dot the sand. Between the

distillation units, pipelines run from the top of each seaward unit to the foot of each unit to landward, carrying water that at each stage is successively purer. The height difference between the top of one distillation unit and the foot of the next allows the generation of a head of water pressure to accommodate rising land as we move away from the seashore.

Fig.1 Desalination Unit In one possible design, each distillation unit is a two-part structure made up of a boiler and a condenser tower. See Fig. 1. The boiler is a hollow cylindrical vessel lying nearly on its side, its axis aligned north to south. One end of the vessel is raised so as to make the cylinder's axis perpendicular to the equinoctial sun angle at midday, maximizing its exposure to solar radiation. The upper half-surface of the cylinder is transparent glass that transmits infrared and light radiation. The lower half of the cylinder has a mirrored surface to concentrate the radiation in the region of the cylinder axis. Water is fed into the lower end of a pipe running the length of the

cylinder axis. The mirrored surfaces focuses sunlight on the pipe at the axis, bringing it above boiling point and driving the resulting steam upward along the pipe. The pipe turns to a vertical run upward within a tower supporting a large spheroidal cooling and condensation chamber at its top. The cooling chamber is shielded and insulated from the sun to a degree that allows condensation of the water vapor. The condensate is collected in the bottom of the cooling chamber, and funneled down one or more separate conduits into an outgoing pipeline. The daily heating/cooling cycle of the deserts may be used to evaporate the saline water during the day and condense the purified water at night. Variations of the design draw off some of the solar energy to generate electricity, which may be used in removing the waste minerals and supplying electric power to meet nearby demand. A long series of such distillation units serves as a passive water delivery system across entire regions, using few or no mechanical pumping devices, with electricity as a by-product. In normal operation, the system consumes only solar energy, and requires only cleaning out the accumulations of salts and other waste from the sea.

Getting to the Vision This project should be seen as a step in an evolutionary process that continually improves, concentrates, and enriches the technologies needed to make it work as well as possible. It must be understood that the earliest stages will be done more crudely and with less-advanced capabilities within our immediate reach, and that later stages will propagate new methods, efficiencies, components, and systems throughout the whole world as they unfold from our gained understanding of what we're doing.

Basis in Principles The essential ideas are quite simple. Use solar heat to evaporate water to vapor, collect and store the vapor, cool the vapor, collect the condensate, and repeat, as in a still. In the evaporation step, use the heat of expansion to raise the vapor higher than the source water, making a pump to elevate the condensate without the use of anything except solar energy. Concatenate a series of such stills to purify the incoming water and pump it to higher elevations for distribution and delivery. These steps must operate across the boiling temperature range of water, in both less-pure and purer forms. It is preferable that the steps operate in as narrow a temperature range as possible in order to reduce the cost of raising and lowering the temperatures of water and water vapor across the boiling temperature range.

Ideally this is an entirely passive system, with no moving parts or labor except for those required for removal of salts and minerals from the evaporative components of the stills. Clearly a set of factors exist which prevent ideal operation, e.g., sandstorms that abrade the glass components of the stills and reduce the light transmission efficiency, heavy deposits of salts requiring frequent removal, and breaks in the pipelines that move the solar-pumped water from one distillation unit to the next across country. Efficiency of the initial systems is expected to be low. This outline doesn't address the broad range of possible engineering improvements to the basic idea that would yield greater efficiency with smaller units and less effort and material requirements. Such improvements are expected to be made as the project progresses, and retrofitted whenever and wherever appropriate.

Building: An Example There are many ways to attempt this project, and what follows is a speculative presentation. The success of any actual attempt will hinge on the application of detailed engineering principles and practices to all aspects of the basic idea. In the present example, the project entails four stages of building: fabricating the building blocks and elements, assembling the blocks and elements into the mechanisms, combining the mechanisms to make the desalination plants, and putting the plants to work turning seawater into fresh water. At first, some of these steps must be done with what we have already, using perhaps fossil and nuclear and other fuels to bootstrap the more-efficient and cleaner solar-energy solutions into place.

Fabrication The first stage of the project is diagrammed in Fig. 2. Sand is our basic building material. It is silicon dioxide, and we currently make a wide variety of glasses and ceramic structural elements from it. The abundance of solar energy in the deserts may be tapped to focus sunlight onto crucibles and systems that melt, refine, and temper the sands to fabricate blocks, pipes, valves, and mirrors for cylindrical boilers. Waste glass from the fabrication process may be recycled as input alongside the sand, improving efficiency and reducing waste. The crucibles and systems could make up a mobile ceramic foundry, which crawls from one distillation unit site to the next, taking in sand, solar energy, some metals, and reclaimed waste glass to produce the pipes, blocks, mirrors, and glass required for the distillation units. In an alternative system, ceramic foundries can be set permanently in locations where the best-quality sand is found, and transportation of the products can be done from these locations.

Fig. 2 Project Phase 1 Diagram The fabricated blocks take various forms: an opaque insulating form and a transparent energyconducting form. Some blocks are formed as transparent glass sectors for the light-admitting part of the boiler vessel. Some blocks are used as the backing and support for the mirrored parts of the boiler vessel. Some blocks are cast, cut, or shaped into a sector of a circle as is a large brick for a chimney. The circle has the radius of the whole condensation tower. Some blocks are cast, cut, or shaped into different sectors of a spheroid to form the coooling and condensation chamber and its insulating outer layers.

The second stage of the project is diagrammed in Fig. 3. The distillation unit is built from the blocks described, by transporters and constructors that carry and assemble the blocks into the unit. In regions with abundant solar energy, these transporters and constructors may be fully or partially powered by that energy.

Fig. 3 Project Phase 2 Diagram The working length of the boiler's pipe depends on the pressure head on the incoming water. At the seaside, there is no pressure head without separate pumping facilities, so the water must be raised using either an evaporation pan with a collector above the pan, or else a mechanical pump. See Project Phase 3 Diagram. Distillation units are connected in series over long distances, to provide multiple distillation stages and movement of the water to its desired destiantions. Distillation units may also be stacked vertically in overlapping fashion to provide added elevation

to the final output of one distillation site. The final output is then sent down a descending opaque glass pipe to the next site.

Fig. 4 Project Phase 3 Diagram Valves fabricated for these units allow inflow of water to the bottom of each unit but prevent the pressure of the heated water and water vapor from blocking the influx of further intake water. Given a small head of pressure in the incoming water, a ball valve can be used; many improvements on such a design are possible. See Project Phase 4 Diagram. When the desalination system is in operation, it uses solar energy and sea water in large quantities, and a small amount of metals and other materials in small quantities, to deliver both fresh water and electric power to communities at great distances from the sea water source point. In addition, some minerals and metals may be reclaimed from the salts and other impurities left behind as solids in the distillation process. 7

Fig. 4 Project Phase 3 Diagram

Assembly and Combination The assembly process should contain as many automated steps as possible due to the harsh environmental conditions that would make manual labor difficult or impossible. This automation should encompass everything from fabrication to the actual bricklaying and pipefitting of each tower. The constructor equipment that automates the process must also be mobile enough to move along the route of the pipeline so that it can be reused for each tower and lay the pipes between towers as it goes. The powering of the constructors can be done at least partially through solar energy in some form, even by something as simple as steam created from the water produced along the pipeline and heated by reflectors.

One significant advantage of this kind of design is the reusability of its lessons in extraterrestrial settings, such as lunar, asteroidal, or other-planetary. Thanks to the pervasive availability of solar energy all along the route of the pipelines, such energy may also be used to support 'welding' of the ceramic pipe segments produced in fabrication from the sands. Fabrication of glasses and ceramics is an art that offers a wide range of properties in the products, including higher or lower melting temperatures, differing fusing characteristics, different hardnesses and toughnesses, and much more. At the seaside, the proposed system serves primarily to remove salts, minerals, and other impurities from the sea water. As the pipeline carries the water to towers further and further inland, the role of the units shifts along the way from purification to pumping, all driven solely by sunlight. An added opportunity presents itself: the possible use of energy-capture technologies now in development to produce electricity directly from the bricks being fabricated for the desalination process. Such electricity could be used to power monitoring and management systems for the pipelines, and even supply electricity to communities along the path of the pipelines. Furthermore, the constructors may also be fitted to produce low-efficiency solar cell arrays that it distributes along its route, wiring them together with conventional electrical-power distribution components. These arrays provide two things: power from the sun, and shelter beneath their panels. Coupled with a small supply of water from the adjacent pipeline, the result might be habitable space where some crops might be grown, given the availability of fertilizers and other soil-development components.

Desalination In the end, we get pure water, delivered to regions of the world that have not seen water of any kind for periods ranging from decades to millennia. We can also get some added energy fed into the power grids of areas that have never seen such things. The systems that produce all this have few if any moving parts, and little or no fuel costs. The result will be the transformation of entire nations from abject submission to the extremes of heat and drought to productive, stable, healthy, and prosperous existence, in harmony with each other and their planet.