Adsorption desalination employing silica gel-water system

Adsorption desalination, known as AD in short, is considered to be one of the promising solutions to the water shortage in many water stressed countries which has been proven to be a low cost process. Nowadays, the adsorption desalination is usually combined with cooling technology which utilize waste heat or recycle energy to achieve cooling effect. Since this kind of combine technology is able to achieve dual benefits and does not require the use of environmentally harmful refrigerants, it gains attentions for researches. This report will begin with the introduction of different types of desalination, which is then followed by a literature review for the earlier researches. The author also studied previous Past Year Report on the design of intermittent silica gel water adsorption system in order to have a better understanding of the process. Furthermore, this report elaborates the operation process of existing AD plant in Nanyang Technological University and investigates experimentally the performance of the adsorption chiller in terms of COP and SCP under various conditions. Subsequently, the water production rate is being calculated to identify the efficiency or reliability of the desalination method. Lastly, a review of the existing system such as problems occurred during the experiments and the possible reasons will be discussed, followed by certain recommendations for future work.Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical Engineering