Designing desalination systems for higher productivity

One of the goals of sustainable development is higher fuel efficiency at lo wer product cost for systems that use or produce power and heat. This paper presents a second-law-based methodology that aims at this goal. The method ology allows the intensive analysis of design concepts in order to reveal o pportunities of fuel and cost savings. The application in this paper is dev oted to seawater distillation, The methodology is described, Its applicatio n is demonstrated by a design improvement journey for fuel-driven seawater distillation systems. The journey starts with a simple boiler-MSF distiller , reaches a cogeneration configuration and ends with a hybrid configuration worthwhile future development. The journey is presented on a cost-efficien cy diagram. Solar-driven distillation is also presented for comparison. Sev eral important issues are discussed.