Thermal Desalination Systems: From Traditionality to Modernity and Development

Abstract

As well known, the basic birthrights of human are the clean air, clean water, healthy food, and green energy. So, clean water is the second important requested need of all living organisms on Earth. To know the importance of water to our human bodies, a deficiency of just 2% in our body’s water supply indicates dehydration. Nowadays, all countries suffer from the problem of freshwater shortage. Despite the importance of clean water for our lives, only 0.01% is available as surface water such as the rivers, lakes, and swamps. These frightening facts have made it a national and humanitarian duty for scientists to research how to overcome the water problem and how to provide alternative sources of safe drinking water using renewable energies. Desalination is the most famous and operative technique used to overcome this problem. In this chapter, the different desalination techniques are reviewed and reported. Also, the solar distillation processes are mentioned with an extended review on the solar distillers. Besides, the application of artificial intelligence in improving the performance of desalination systems is reported. The main conclusions are stated at the end of this chapter.