Hydrophasec Technology
The Hydrophasec Solution
Water demand and supply have become an international issue due to several factors: global warming (droughts are more often in arid areas), low annual rainfall, a rise in population, high living standards, and the expansion of industrial and agricultural activities. Fresh water from rivers and groundwater sources are becoming limited. Therefore, it has turned into a competition to get this vital liquid and to find more feasible and economical sources that can quench the great demand that the world requires and avoid water restrictions and service interruptions to domestic water supply.
The oceans represent the earth’s major water reservoir. About 97% of the earth’s water is seawater while another 2% is locked in icecaps and glaciers. Available fresh water accounts for less than 0.5% of the earth’s total water supply. So even though seawater is not suitable for human use and agricultural purposes, desalination can provide a potential solution by removing salt from seawater such that seawater becomes a quasi-unlimited source of fresh water. This can occur while conventional water supplies are turning very expensive due to the over exploitation of aquifers and the high costs related to wastewater treatment. Desalination also has the great advantage that it does not depend on climate conditions and the storage of rainfall.
Desalination is an excellent alternative for getting fresh water, especially in dry places such as the Middle East and North Africa, and in regions which are surrounded by seawater at their boundaries, such as Australia.
Current Desalination Methods
According to International Desalination Association, there are over 14,000 desalination plants in operation worldwide, producing over 60 million cubic meters per day (15.8 billion gallons a day) of fresh water. Of all these plants, the two most common treatment methods are the Multi-Stage Flash Distillation and Reverse Osmosis Membrane processes. Multi-Stage Flash Distillation utilizes heat and reduced pressure to flash produce steam which is distilled to fresh water. A significant amount of heat is required and these plants are often located next to a power plant using the power plant waste heat to assist with the processing. Reverse Osmosis processing uses membrane filter technology to pass salt water through an extremely small pore size membrane to obtain fresh water, while diverting the highly concentrated salt brine eleswhere. This process requires extensive prefiltering to protect the membrane, and depending on the salinity of the saltwater, requires up to 1000 psi pressure to operate. Both of these processes are extremely energy intensive. Given below are examples of two of the largest desalination plants in the world.
An example of a Multi-Stage Flash Distillation plant is the Shoaiba desalination plant in Saudi Arabia that was completed in 2003 at a cost of $1.06 billion. It can produce 150 million cubic meters per year (410,000 cubic meters per day) of fresh water.
An example of a Reverse Osmosis plant is the Hadera desalination plant in Israel that was completed in 2010 at a cost of $542 million. It can produce 127 million cubic meters per year (462,000 cubic meters per day) of fresh water.
The attractiveness of Hydrophasec desalination, concerning this section, comes from the fact that it does not require high heat, high pressure, or extensive prefiltering. Note: If Hydrophasec desalination was being used at the flow rate of the Hadera plant and was achieving even a modest 25% savings in operating cost, and given the lowest approximate cost of $0.50 per cubic meter of water, this would represent a savings of $13.3 million per year!
Demand is Increasing
The demand for desalination products and services is expected to increase 9.3 percent annually to $13.4 billion in 2015. As an example of the increased buildup of desalination plants around the world, the following information is provided from The Austrailian, July 2010. (Note that the use of the unit thousand liters in the article is the same as one cubic meter. Also, all of the plants discussed are Sea Water Reverse Osmosis types)
“Households are paying at least 10 times more for energy-guzzling desalinated water than for traditional dam water. This comes as Australia seeks to drought-proof its growing cities." State governments are spending $9 billion to build desalination plants in Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, Adelaide and on the Gold Coast. But the energy-guzzling "water factories" are feeding steep increases in water prices, with household bills rising as much as 22 % last month. Inquiries by The Australian reveal that electricity charges make up half the cost of running Sydney's new $1.8bn desalination plant at Kurnell, which is powered by a wind farm. Water from the Kurnell plant is costing $2.24 per thousand litres, including the capital cost, debt payments and operating costs. Dam water, however, can cost as little as 15 cents per thousand litres, depending on the age of the dam, the filtration methods and the length of pipeline. Water from Perth's existing desalination plant costs $1.36 per thousand litres, but the price of water from a second desalination plant due to be commissioned late next year will soar to $2.11 per thousand litres. In Melbourne, desalinated water is predicted to cost $1.37 per thousand litres, including the construction and operating costs of the $3.5bn plant to open next year. The Water Services Association of Australia, representing the nation's major water utilities, said the desalination process consumed between 3.5 and 4.3 kilowatt/hours (kWh) of electricity per thousand litres, compared to 0.2 kWh for conventional dam water.
Basic HVM Desalination Theory
The basic scheme in any desalination technique is to break the bond that dissolved salt has created with the pure water molecule and divert the pure water away from the resulting concentrated salt (brine). A simple explanation is as follows: The hydrogen and oxygen that make up a water molecule (H2O) are held together by what is known as a covalent bond. This bond is much stronger than the type of bond that holds sodium and chlorine together as salt (NaCl) which is known as an ionic bond. Also, when sodium and chlorine dissolve in water they individually bond with the water molecule with an ionic bond, again weaker than the covalent bond of the water molecule. Also note that the reason salt dissolves in water is that the ionic bond between either sodium or chlorine when they individually bond with the water molecule is more attractive and stronger than the bond they have with each other when they form a salt crystal.
For the two processes discussed in this paper Multi-Stage Flash Distillation breaks the ionic bond of sodium and chlorine with water using heat energy. Reverse Osmosis forces the water through extremely small pores (less than 0.0001 micron) in the reverse osmosis membrane under high pressure. In both cases the pure water is freed and the sodium and chlorine recombine as salt.
Hydrophasec technology proves that the ionic bond between water and the dissolved sodium and chlorine can be broken using vortational flow of the water in concert with induced resonance according to Holophasec Vortex Mechanics principles in a low energy operation. The desalination chamber is designed to establish a saline gradient where fresh water is easily removed from the brine stream. Holophasec techniques can also be developed to utilize the brine stream and not regard it as waste. Finally, the output of the desalinator also provides for highly structured (coherent, healthy) water as opposed to traditional municipal water sources.
Conclusion
The demand for fresh water on this planet has become a critical issue. While desalination plants are rapidly being built to circumvent a global thirst, the current techniques are very energy intensive and create high cost water. Hydrophasec technology has the opportunity to provide a revolutionary solution to these issues, provide a huge return on investment and cost effective clean water for the masses.