Water is one of the most fundamental components to life. Unfortunately, only 1% of the Earth’s water is fresh water, the other 99% of which being saline or contaminated, making it undrinkable. This little amount of water being inadequate to our living needs. Especially in densely populated and low rainfall areas, the shortage of water presents a considerable problem for our world.
Ever since the 3rd century, desalination has been a proven method of extracting water for use. Sailors used sponges to capture the vapor of boiling water, and squeezed the water out of the sponges to provide for their travelling needs. Desalination has since become a method of recovering potable water from saline water.
Technology for desalination has been developed on an industrial scale since the late 18th century. The earliest known desalination plant is in Malta, an island in the Mediterranean Sea, in the year 1881. Malta still gets a large percentage of its drinking water from the sea.
Desalination of salt (or "saline") water has been practiced regularly for over 50 years and is a well-established means of water supply in most countries throughout the world. It has been estimated that more than 120 countries are presently using more than 11,000 desalting units to purify water for a wide variety of uses, and that the total installed (or contracted) plant capacity exceeds 20,000,000 m3/day (5.3 billion gallons per day). The costs for desalination have been decreasing rapidly, especially in recent years with the introduction of improved, more cost-effective technologies.
There are many methods of desalination today, each working in close relation with the others to produce fresh water. In the following pages we will discuss these listed methods of desalination:
Since there is no perfect solution to water production, the following topics will also be discussed to consider the possibilities of desalination.
This online presentation has been created by: Mia Lafontaine, Rachel D'Souza, Omer Fereig & Derek Tse.