Optimisation of multi effect distillation based desalination system for minimum production cost for freshwater

The multi effect distillation (MED) process has been extensively used for seawater desalination as a prominent process to produce high quality freshwater. However, the impact of number of effects in the MED process-based seawater desalination on the fresh water production cost has not been critically evaluated in the literature. Therefore, the aim of this study is to resolve this particular challenge via the simulation for a given seawater concentration and temperature conditions. The simulation is carried out using a comprehensive MED process model coupled with appropriate cost functions within gPROMS model builder software. The simulation results show that selecting the optimal number of the MED effects as 17 is important to achieve the lowest fresh water production cost for a given seawater operating conditions.