Desalination is the removal of salts from sea water or brackish water to produce drinking water.

Normal sea water can contain up to a few percents of salt, while drinking water contains only more than 10 ppm of salt.

The most commenly used technique to desalinate is the use of reversed osmosis. This technique is able to remove the salts in one step.

Due to the high osmotic pressure of sea water the working pressure can be very high (up to 100 bar) for reversed osmosis desalination systems.

Alternative desalination techniques are distillation, electrodialysis, ion exchange and carbonate removal.

More on this subject:

Desalination with Reverse Osmosis

Desalination installations

Desalination installations system design

Desalination pre-treatment

Membrane technology

Scaling and antiscalants