Towards zero liquid discharge technology for treating the reject brine/wastewater from RO plants

Desalination has become the leading method to achieve potable water, specifically in the middle east regions. However, the continuous discharge of large volume of concentrated brine from desalination plants worldwide poses a major hazard to the environment and also represents a significant wastage of natural resources. One of the sustainable solutions to water scarcity and to reduce the negative environmental impact of desalination or advanced industrialization is the development of zero-liquid discharge (ZLD) technology. This technology maximizes the water recovery, and in ideal conditions, the release of the wastewater volume is reached to zero. Due to its significance many efforts are being made to develop sustainable ZLD technologies, however, the high cost and unwanted complexity of most of the methods put a hindrance to adopting massively at the industrial level. In the proposed research project, a simple, cost-effective and highly efficient vacuum based method for zero liquid discharge (ZLD) technology will be designed for the production of clean water and recovery of minerals from desalination plant discharges. The proposed system can be operated by using various economical and energy efficient resources such as waste heat, solar energy, wind energy and other renewable and non-renewable energy sources depending on its easy availability at low operational cost. The feasibility, efficiency, energy consumption and cost analysis of the designed vacuum based zero liquid discharge system will be validated by computational simulation analysis. The results of computational simulation analysis will be used to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed setup.