Working Principles
Working Principles in Desalination Systems. A framework by the Desalination Institute DME that explains how every desalination method separates salt from water, and organises them by their primary driving force.
Three aspects
- General structure: a systematic way to capture all desalination methods (leads into the CDT classification)
- Interdisciplinary nature: desalination combines several scientific disciplines
- Focus on primary forces: the primary driving force of separation is the central ordering criterion
A thermodynamic reference
Every desalination is a separation bound by a thermodynamic minimum (Gibbs energy of mixing), a process-independent benchmark for all technologies. For seawater (35 g/L, 25 °C) the minimum separation work is about 1.06 kWh/m³ (approaching zero recovery) and about 1.1 kWh/m³ at 50% recovery; the osmotic pressure is about 27-28 bar. Real processes lie above this (second law).