• Journal of Korean Society of Water and Wastewater
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• v.34 no.6
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• pp.403-410
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• 2020

The difficulty of securing freshwater sources is increasing with global climate change. On the other hand, seawater is less affected by climate change and regarded as a stable water source. For utilizing seawater as freshwater, seawater desalination technologies should be employed to reduce the concentration of salts. However, current desalination technologies might accelerate climate change and create problems for the ecosystem. The desalination technologies consume higher energy than conventional water treatment technologies, increase carbon footprint with high electricity use, and discharge high salinity of concentrate to the ocean. Thus, it is critical to developing green desalination technologies for sustainable desalination in the era of climate change. The energy consumption of desalination can be lowered by minimizing pump irreversibility, reducing feed salinity, and harvesting osmotic energy. Also, the carbon footprint can be reduced by employing renewable energy sources to the desalination system. Furthermore, the volume of concentrate discharge can be minimized by recovering valuable minerals from high-salinity concentrate. The future green seawater desalination can be achieved by the advancement of desalination technologies, the employment of renewable energy, and the utilization of concentrate.

• Journal of Korean Society of Water and Wastewater
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.251-255
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• 2009

Foreign and domestic seawater desalination plant market investigation was performed to analyze the worldwide trend of seawater desalination plant market and to establish the activation plan for seawater desalination plant application. Water demand and seawater desalination related laws and regulations were investigated and analyzed for the activation plan. RO type and large scale plants are popular nowadays however there are only small plants in island region in Korea. There will be about $1 million\;m^3/day$ deficit in 2015 according to the water demand forecasting from Ministry of Environment and Ministry of Land, Transportation, and Maritime Affairs in Korea. Therefore, it is necessary to activate the domestic application of seawater desalination plant to secure stable water resources. To activate the domestic application of seawater desalination plant, first, we need to establish regulations, support system in the water service law for seawater desalination plant. Second, related Ministry should increase the support for the operation and management of seawater desalination plant and suggest the construction of seawater desalination plant for water resources security near seaside region.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Industry Convergence
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• v.24 no.6_2
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• pp.827-839
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• 2021

Due to climate change and population growth, water scarcity is getting worse all over the world. Among various methods for desalination of seawater, the Multi-Effect Adsorptive Desalination method, which combines the existing Multi-Effect Desalination method and the Adsorptive Desalination method and can produce high-concentration-high-concentration freshwater, is emerging. Because the Multi-Effect Adsorptive Desalination method combines the two different methods, the system becomes complicated and the possibility of failure increases. Therefore, in this study, availability analysis was performed on the Multi-Effect Adsorptive Desalination process. A total of four types of reliability block diagrams were presented, and availability analysis was conducted based on them. The first form of a reliability block diagram is configured in series without any redundancy. The availability of the reliability block diagram composed of the serial system was found to be lower than the required availability. In order to increase availability, the redundancy to pumps and boiler are added to system. As a result of availability analysis, it was confirmed that designing desalination systems with redundancy to pump meets the 93% availability, which is typically required availability for various plants.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Visualization
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.16-21
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• 2015

Concentration polarization(CP) phenomena show great potential on desalination technology. As we can control the dimension of silicon based nanochannel system, it can be used to model ion exchange membrane. In this study, to investigate the effect of nanochannel number and working conditions on the CP based desalination process, nanochannel based microfluidic system is fabricated. First, we optimized nanochannel number and working conditions to conduct visualization study on CP based desalination process. Second, we visualized the desalination process with fluorescent dye in the desalination chip. We also visualized that the particles also can be removed by the CP based desalination process.

• Proceedings of the Membrane Society of Korea Conference
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• 2002.07a
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• pp.1-12
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• 2002

Desalination by reverse osmosis (RO), which first entered commercial use in the 1970s, was initially mainly used for treating brackish water. Technological progress led to the development of an RO membrane enabling single-pass seawater desalination. Toyobo succeeded in developing a single-pass seawater desalination RO module composed of hollow fiber type membranes made of cellulose triacetate in 1978, and then in 1979 began production of the first commercially available double-element module. This double-element module has many advantages suitable for seawater desalination. It has high chlorine tolerance and high salt rejection, derived from the properties of the membrane material, and it is highly resistant to fouling and scaling matters due to the unique flow pattern and fiber bundle configuration. These advantages help to explain why the Toyobo double-element module has been used so successfully at the many seawater desalination plants around the world. Since the 1980s, large plants capable of desalinating several tens of thousands of cubic meters a day have sprung up around the Mediterranean and In the Middle East. The Jeddah RO Phase I Plant, which has a capacity of 56, 800m$^3$/day, went into operation in 1989. In 1994, the same sized Phase II Plant came on stream, giving the plant a huge total capacity of 113, 600m$^3$/day. The plant constructor Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. (MHI), and the RO membrane manufacturer Toyobo Co., Ltd. In 1998, the world's largest RO seawater desalination plant in operation, which has a capacity of 128, 000m$^3$/day and is run by Saudi Arabia's Saline Water Conversion Corporation (SWCC), went into operation at Yanbu. RO seawater desalination technology has thus already reached the stage of full-scale commercial use. In order to encourage its wider use, however, RO desalination needs to be made more economical by lowering construction and water treatment costs. Toyobo has therefore developed a new economical RO desalination system by a recovery ratio of 60% using a high-pressure module with a high product flow rate. In 2000, Toyobo high recovery membrane module was selected for the largest seawater desalination plant in Japan, which has a capacity of 50, 000m$^3$/day.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Systems Engineering
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.73-87
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• 2016

Combining power generation and water production by desalination is economically advantageous. Most desalination projects use fossil fuels as an energy source, and thus contribute to increased levels of greenhouse gases. Environmental concerns have spurred researchers to find new sources of energy for desalination plants. The coupling of nuclear power production with desalination is one of the best options to achieve growth with lower environmental impact. In this paper, we will per-form a sensitivity study of coupling nuclear power to various combinations of desalination technology: {1} thermal (MSF [Multi-Stage Flashing], MED [Multi-Effect Distillation], and MED-TVC [Multi-Effect Distillation with Thermal Vapour Compression]); {2} membrane RO [Reverse Osmosis]; and {3} hybrid (MSF-RO [Multi-Stage Flashing & Reverse Osmosis] and MED-RO [Multi-Effect Distillation & Reverse Osmosis]). The Korean designed reactor plant, the APR1400 will be modeled as the energy production facility. The economical evaluation will then be executed using the computer program DEEP (Desalination Economic Evaluation Program) as developed by the IAEA. The program has capabilities to model several types of nuclear and fossil power plants, nuclear and fossil heat sources, and thermal distillation and membrane desalination technologies. The output of DEEP includes levelized water and power costs, breakdowns of cost components, energy consumption, and net saleable power for any selected option. In this study, we will examine the APR1400 coupled with a desalination power plant in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) as a prototypical example. The KSA currently has approximately 20% of the installed worldwide capacity for seawater desalination. Utilities such as power and water are constructed and run by the government. Per state practice, economic evaluation for these utilities do not consider or apply interest or carrying cost. Therefore, in this paper the evaluation results will be based on two scenarios. The first one assumes the water utility is under direct government control and in this case the interest and discount rate will be set to zero. The second scenario will assume that the water utility is controlled by a private enterprise and in this case we will consider different values of interest and discount rates (4%, 8%, & 12%).

• Journal of Korean Society of Water and Wastewater
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.401-408
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• 2016

Desalination is getting more attention as an alternative to solve a global water shortage problem in the future. Especially, a desalination technology is being expected as a new growth engine of Korea's overseas plant business besides one of the solutions of domestic water shortage problem. In the past, a thermal evaporation technology was a predominant method in desalination market, but more than 75% of the current market is hold by a membrane-based reverse osmosis technology because of its lower energy consumption rate for desalination. In the future, it is expected to have more energy efficient desalination process. Accordingly, various processes are being developed to further enhance the desalination energy efficiency. One of the promising technologies is a desalination process combined with Pressure Retarded Osmosis (PRO) process. The PRO technology is able to generate energy by using osmotic pressure of seawater or desalination brine. And the other benefits are that it has no emission of $CO_2$ and the limited impact of external environmental factors. However, it is not commercialized yet because a high-performance PRO membrane and module, and a PRO system optimization technology is not sufficiently developed. In this paper, the recent research direction and progress of the SWRO-PRO hybrid desalination was discussed regarding a PRO membrane and module, an energy recovery system, pre-treatment and system optimization technologies, and so on.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers Conference
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• 1998.10a
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• pp.325-330
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• 1998

Seawater desalination is the production of the water, suitable for human consumption, from seawater. Since the water supply produced by desalination is at least as good, in quality than that provided by traditional catchment, the decision as to whether or not desalination plant is to be installed should be made on technical, social, economic grounds. By analysis of these criteria, we selected some regions required seawater desalination.

• Journal of the Korean Professional Engineers Association
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• v.42 no.3
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• pp.27-31
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• 2009

Recent desalination plant system are being operated by applying one of the technologies as like MSF, MED and, or RO. The production cost of pure water from sea water by the desalination plant was U$9/m$^3$ in 1960, but now has been reduced to U$1/m$^3$ at present. The Power and Desalination Plant Project in Al Cobar of Saudi Arabia gave good chance to us export the similar plant systems actively to the world market. 1Hidd IWPP Project in Bahrain, Taweelah B Extension Project in Abu Dhabi of UAE and Ras Laffan B IWPP of Qatar are the recent large scale desalination projects under construction.

• Journal of Korean Society of Water and Wastewater
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• v.30 no.5
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• pp.521-532
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• 2016

Seawater desalination market after global economic crisis has been stalled due to the market uncertainties and decreased demand in desalination. It is important to review the status of the market and to estimate the appropriate share of Forward osmosis-Reverse Osmosis (FO-RO) hybrid desalination technology by figuring out the outlook of the desalination market. Main part of the desalination market will still be MENA (Middle East and North Africa) in the near future due to the fast population increase and high dependency of fossil fuel in the region. The market for FO-RO hybrid technology, however, might be smaller than the conventional SWRO desalination market anyway because of aesthetic issues from using wastewater as raw water and higher costs associated with capex. Therefore, it is essential to improve FO membrane performance and system operation technologies in order to make the hybrid technology attractive compared to the conventional SWRO technology.