Ice suspension crystallization pretreatment for a new hybrid seawater desalination process: Modeling, simulation, and parametric sensitivity study

Abstract

Recent ice suspension crystallization in scraped surface heat exchanger (SSHE) developments and innovations in different industries (chemical, food, and water treatment) have enable this purification operation to become a promising application to seawater desalination. This paper focuses on modeling and simulation of ice suspension seawater SSHE crystallizer of a proposed new hybrid seawater desalination technology (freezing–reverse osmosis). The mathematical model that is developed is based on combining energy and population balance equations. Simulation results show that the developed mathematical model is able to predict physically interpretable trends of main ice suspension seawater crystallization phenomena in SSHE, essentially in terms of the evolution of ice suspension temperature and ice volume fraction. These results are in agreement with other studies conducted for ice suspension crystallization from other solutions. Furthermore, the developed model was used for a parametric sensitivity study to show its ability to quantify different freezing key parameters effects in order to improve the considered ice crystallizer seawater performance under investigation. Thus, the developed phenomenological model can be exploited as a promising tool for understanding ice suspension seawater crystallization phenomena so as identifying the significant variables and it allows to complete design of the new freezing pretreatment process. Hence, it can lead to improvements and optimization of the proposed hybrid seawater desalination performance.