NexGenDesal™ Design
NexGenDesal™ is a modularized, factory tested, scalable, seawater desalination system that uses no chemicals or on-site operators, employs predictive diagnostics, and has the lowest Specific Power Consumption and Carbon Footprint in the industry, while achieving the lowest projected Total Cost of Ownership of any seawater desalination system currently available.
If you wonder how NexGenDesal™ attains these amazing results, follow us through the process.
It begins with Systems Engineering and years of refinement, to achieve uniquely advanced performance attributes and ends with a system that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Approximately 80% of NexGenDesal system components are commercially available off the shelf (COTS), while the remainder are proprietary - the result of almost 20 years of work alongside leading National Labs in the United Sates and the former Soviet Union.
If you wonder how NexGenDesal™ attains these amazing results, follow us through the process.
It begins with Systems Engineering and years of refinement, to achieve uniquely advanced performance attributes and ends with a system that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Approximately 80% of NexGenDesal system components are commercially available off the shelf (COTS), while the remainder are proprietary - the result of almost 20 years of work alongside leading National Labs in the United Sates and the former Soviet Union.
Energy Sources |
Renewable sources (such as solar, wind, sea kinetic, and waste to syngas) can run the plants independently from local electrical grids. Intermittency of renewable sources can be solved by the production and storage of pressurized hydrogen, fed into COTS fuel cells.
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Pretreatment |
Intake: Our pretreatment actually starts with horizontal intake wells, incorporating Neodren™ intakes, to pre-filter the seawater. This work is contracted to companies that have installed many of these systems worldwide, initially for aquariums, and now for desalination plants.
Combined Effects: Next is the Combined Effects Pretreatment stage (the most proprietary aspect of NexGenDesal, which eliminates the need for chlorine, acid and anti-scaling polymers). This hyper-oxidation and cavitation approach allows CAP Water & Power International to control scale, destroy pathogens, and avert membrane fouling using COTS and/or proprietary technology. Cake Filtration: The Cake Filtration Stage is based on work pioneered at Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL) using a titanium screen in self-cleaning filters. Flux Enhancement: Depending on the seawater temperature, the next step may be to heat the intake water in a compact, counter-flow titanium flat plate heat exchanger (also developed in conjunction with ORNL). By heating the feed water, flux increases, reducing the power required to pump, and enabling the system to reach optimal efficiency at minimum power. Heat can be collected from combined solar electric/thermal systems, fuel cells, or syngas driven turbines. Degassing: In the final pretreatment process, the feed water is passed through a mass transfer column that converts residual ozone back to oxygen and removes other gases, thus reducing pumping energy demand. |
Reverse Osmosis Stage |
1. Pre-treated seawater enters the RO stage, using COTS reciprocal, multi-piston positive displacement pumps which not only are highly efficient, but reduce the acoustic signature over normal positive displacement pumps.
2. Water then enters conventional pressure vessels, employing inter-stage design and distribution of membranes. High pressure brine is used for energy recovery, using pressure exchangers to recover energy with no mixing of brine and incoming water. 3. NexGenDesal’s reduced recovery rate (percentage of potable water recovered from the seawater) achieves critical point optimization for the system, based on the physics of the pressure loop. In this way the energy requirement is minimized, while maintaining a brine velocity that mitigates the problem of membrane fouling and yields lower concentration brine at optimum discharge velocity for mixing into the sea. It has taken years of system engineering to achieve this critical point optimization. 4. If Flux Enhancement has been utilized, the added heat is removed from the permeate and brine by the heat exchanger. 5. Brine discharge into the sea using duckbill diffusers is a proven, maintenance free approach that causes little, if any, measurable impact on the marine environment. Water will exit at a relatively low flow rate with no chemicals and will be within 1-2 degrees of ambient water temperature. |
Lights-Out Operability
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NexGenDesal Plants will
1. Run automatically, requiring no on-site operators, and will be controlled remotely via a commercial Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system with a sensor set that has been validated in conjunction with the Department of Energy; 2. Be connected to our Operations Center via selected satellite systems that do not employ ground stations, thereby eliminating less secure Internet and phone connections, as well as utilizing compressed burst communications protocol to support the predictive diagnostics. |