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Journal of Environmental Waste Management and Recycling | Volume 1
March 05-06, 2018 | London, UK
Recycling & Waste Management
5
th
International Conference on
Multi-effect distillation: A key component for a circular economy approach in industrial waste waters
– A preliminary techno-economic assessment
Marina Micari
1
, M Moser
1
, B Fuchs
1
, B Ortega-Delgado
2
, A Tamburini
2
, A Cipollina
2
, G Micale
2
1
Institute of Engineering Thermodynamics, Germany
2
University of Palermo, Italy
M
ost industrial processes make use of a considerable
amount of water and energy while releasing waste
heat and waste water solutions (also called brines). A circular
economy approach can be applied to the industrial brines to
recover some of the valuable main components contained
in the brines and to exploit the waste heat generated by
the industrial process itself. Our work is focused on the
investigation of possible combinations of waste water
treatment processes, in order to maximize the purity of the
recovered materials and to minimize the energy requirement
as well as the eventual environmental impacts of the brines.
This work reports a detailed techno-economical investigation
of the Multi-Effect Distillation process and its possible
employment in a waste water treatment chain. A new
flexible techno-economic model for the MED process was
implemented in Python, which takes into account different
flow arrangements and layouts (parallel cross, forward feed,
with or without the TVC). A particular attention was paid on
the influence of important variable and of their estimation
(such as the pressure losses and the Boiling Point Elevation)
with respect to the global outputs. This analysis highlighted
how the pressure losses plays a fundamental role in the
definition of the heat exchanger areas and, then, of the
capital costs of the plant. The influence of several input
parameters, e.g. the number of effects, the composition
of the brine and the distillate flow rate, was analyzed both
from the technical and the economical point of view. Finally,
starting from real examples of industrial brines, we were able
to identify the optimum sizes and process parameters which
minimize the water production costs, for a required amount
of produced pure water and for a certain brine composition.
Speaker Biography
Marina Micari studied Chemical Engineering at the University of Palermo and obtained
her degree (cum Laude) in 2016 with a diploma thesis titled “Closed Loop Reverse
Electrodialysis: Experiments and Mathematical Modelling”. After that she worked as a
researcher of the University of Palermo in the EU-funded project RED-Heat-to-Power.
Her activities have been –towards development and optimization of a mathematical
model, describing the Reverse Electrodialysis apparatus, as well as the analysis of the
integrated system composed by Reverse Electrodialysis and Multiple Effect Distillation
and the one composed by Reverse Electrodialysis and Membrane Distillation. She
joined DLR, Stuttgart in June 2017 and started her PhD within the framework of the
ZERO BRINE project.
e:
Marina.Micari@dlr.de