Abstract
Multi effect distillation (MED) has recently led the thermal desalination market after leaving the MSF process behind amongst the thermal processes. Integration of vapor compression with MED (TVC-MED) led to an enhancement in the economics of MED compared to MSF. On the other hand, as thermal desalination still has leverage in terms of operational experience and reliability, the Desalination Technologies Research Institute (DTRI) initiated a long-term research project for 5 y aimed at MED performance enhancement. In this paper, the successful attempt at increasing the top brine temperature (TBT) of the MED process from conventional 65 degrees C to 95 degrees C with anti-scalant has been discussed. This approach has technical and economic advantages over acid treatment. Such an increase in TBT will increase the operating temperature range of MED by a factor of more than two, which will be reflected directly in system efficiency and improved MED-TVC economics.