A Hydrostatic Pressure-Driven Desalination System for Large-Scale Deep Sea Space Station

Abstract

Compared with the common marine renewable energy sources like solar, wind, and wave energy, etc., the hydraulic pressure stored in the deep seawater can output stable and successive energy flow. Thus, it can be directly coupled with the reverse osmosis (RO) process to supply drinkable mineral water for crews of Deep Sea Space Station (DSSS). We proposed a novel submarine RO desalination system driven by the hydraulic pressure of deep seawater (SHP-RO), composed of a desalination branch to generate fresh water and a back pressure branch to ensure the depth independence of the desalination. The influences of the deep sea environment on the RO were analyzed, based on which the pretreatment of the seawater and the preparation of the drinkable mineral water were studied. The turbine-based energy recovery scheme was investigated in virtue of the CFD simulation on the flow behavior in the different turbine series. It was predicted that, when the DSSS was located at the depth of 1100 m and the operating pressure of the RO process was 6.0 MPa, for a drinkable water production rate of 240 m3/d, the recovered hydraulic pressure energy can achieve 39.22 kW·h, which was enough for driving electricity consumers in the SHP-RO system.