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Low Grade Heat Driven Multi-effect Distillation and Desalination describes the development of advanced multi-effect evaporation technologies that are driven by low grade sensible heat, including process waste heat in refineries, heat rejection from diesel generators or microturbines, and solar and geothermal energy. The technologies discussed can be applied to desalination in remote areas, purifying produced water in oil-and-gas industries, and to re-concentrate process liquor in refineries.
This book is ideal for researchers, engineering scientists, graduate students, and industrial practitioners working in the desalination, petrochemical, and mineral refining sectors, helping them... 

Introduction: Biodegradation of azo dyes under harsh environmental conditions has been of great interest for the treatment of colored effluents. The present study aims to evaluate Klebsiella quasipneumoniae GT7 for degrading azo dye Carmoisine under extreme pH conditions and high salinity. Materials and Methods: The growth profiles of bacteria were compared under different conditions of salinity and pH, using the optical density and viability measurements. Kinetic patterns of decolourization by GT7 were investigated under different concentrations of NaCl and/or pH, through the spectrophotometry method. Moreover, thin layer chromatography (TLC) was used to evaluate the biotransformation of... 

In recent years, controlling the salinity and composition of the injected water has become an emerging enhanced oil recovery (EOR) technique, often described as low salinity (LS) waterflooding. This work is done with the intention to contribute to the ongoing discussions about LS waterflooding mechanism(s). For this purpose, a series of different experiments were conducted. At first, the effect of salinity on the interfacial tension (IFT) and the contact angle was evaluated with a crude oil sample. Then to achieve more accurate results in observing oil/water interface, similar IFT experiments were also carried out on a synthetic oil containing asphaltenes. Thereafter, microscopic... 

In this study, the performance of an aerobic moving bed biofilm reactor (MBBR) was assessed for the removal of phenol as the sole substrate from saline wastewater. The effect of several parameters namely inlet phenol concentration (200-1200 mg/L), hydraulic retention time (8-24 h), inlet salt content (10-70 g/L), phenol shock loading, hydraulic shock loading and salt shock loading on the performance of the 10 L MBBR inoculated with a mixed culture of active biomass gradually acclimated to phenol and salt were evaluated in terms of phenol and chemical oxygen demand (COD) removal efficiencies. The results indicated that phenol and COD removal efficiencies are affected by HRT, phenol and salt... 

Increasing demand of fresh water, and limitation water resources, with respect to world economic growth brings up the importance of utilization of saline water. At the current research the sensitivity analysis of ROSA was conducted. For this analysis, a single stage reverse osmosis is designed for well water specifi cation in southern Tehran under following condition: Feed fl ow: 40 m3/h and membrane Element: BW30–400 FR. The sensitivity analyses for all chemical element of base water were performed. As a result of sensitivity analysis shortest sensitivity gap, belongs to boron, and longest sensitivity gap, belongs to calcium. Which refl ects, under the same conditions, the least element to... 

Natural soils contain a certain amount of salt in the form of dissolved ions or electrically charged atoms, originated from the long-term erosion by acidic rainwater. The dissolved salt poses an extra osmotic water potential being normally neglected in laboratory measurements and numerical analyses. However, ignorance of salinity may result in overestimation of stability, and the design may not be as conservative as thought. Therefore, this research aims to first experimentally examine the influence of pore water salinity on water retention curve and saturated permeability of natural dispersive loess under saline and desalinated conditions. Second, the measured parameters are used for... 

This research studied the use of constructed wetlands (CWs) to reduce water salinity. For this purpose, three halophytic species of the Chenopodiaceae family (Salicornia europaea, Salsola crassa, and Bienertia cycloptera) that are resistant to saline conditions were planted in the CWs, and experiments were conducted at three different salinity levels [electrical conductivity (EC)~2, 6, 10 dS/m]. EC and concentrations of calcium (Ca), magnesium (Mg), sodium (Na), and chlorine (Cl) were measured before and after phytoremediation with a retention time of 1 week. The results suggested that these plants were able to grow well and complete their life cycles at all the salinity levels within this... 

Understanding of how anthropogenic droughts occur in socio-hydrological systems is critical in studying resilience of these systems. This is especially relevant when a “lock-in” toward watershed desiccation occurs as an emergent outcome of coupling among social dynamics and surface and underground water processes. How the various processes collectively fit together to reinforce such a lock-in and what may be a critical or ignored feedback worsening the state of the socio-hydrological systems remains poorly understood. Here we tackle this gap by focusing on the case of Lake Urmia in Iran, a saline lake that faces the same fate as that of Aral Sea due to over-extraction of water sources that... 

Oil polarity is an important property impacting the efficiency of low salinity waterflooding (LSWF). It directly affects fluid/fluid and rock/fluid interactions, controlling the interfacial properties and forces. However, the current findings in the literature on the effect of concentration of polar components on oil recovery by LSWF are contradictory. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to investigate how the type of non-polar fractions and the concentration of acidic polar oil constituents change the trapped oil saturation at the pore-scale during LSWF. In this regard, we conducted a series of microfluidics LSWF experiments in both secondary and tertiary modes, using clay-free... 

In situ mixing by dispersive transport of salt and viscous fingering between the injected low-salinity (LS) brine and high-salinity (HS) formation brine can jeopardize the performance of low-salinity waterflooding (LSWF). In our previous papers, we demonstrated that in situ mixing can be suppressed by polymer-enhanced low-salinity waterflooding (PELS), in which a small amount of a viscosifying agent, such as a polymer, is added to the LS stream. Nevertheless, effective mixing control with PELS depends upon several factors and operational conditions, which have not yet been addressed. Therefore, this research focuses on the investigation of the impact of injection parameters, such as the... 

An efficient, novel functionalized supported magnetic nanoparticle (AC@Fe3O4-NH2-COOH) has been synthesized by co-precipitation method for removal of mercury ions from saline solutions. High dispersed supported magnetic nanoparticles with particle sizes less than 30 nm were formed over activated carbon derived from local walnut shell. Surface characterizations of supported magnetic nanoparticles were evaluated by Boehm test, Brunauer- Emmett-Teller (BET) surface area, X-ray diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) and X-ray fluorescence (XRF). A three-layer artificial neural network (ANN) code... 

Groundwater contamination is a significant problem related strongly to both the protection of the environment and the need for water. In the present study, groundwater quality was investigated in the Bojnourd watershed. The Bojnourd watershed is located in the northeast of Iran, which covers 65.5 km2 of the North Khorasan province area. There are 11 extracting wells in the region. Annual water extraction from the alluvial aquifer in the area is used for agriculture, drinking, sanitary and industrial consumptions. In this research, groundwater quantity modeling, including calibration and verification by GMS software, had been performed. In the quality modeling stage, pollution contours for... 

The low salinity water injection has become one of the most important studies in the oil industry for improving oil recovery compared to conventional seawater injection. Thus, extensive studies have been conducted in carbonate and sandstone reservoirs to investigate how the physical properties of rocks and the chemical composition of fluids influence low salinity effect, while, the carbonate reservoir rocks requires more investigation of the effect of molecular and/or ionic interactions. In this experimental work, the effectiveness of various water flooding schemes in carbonate reservoir rock samples is investigated. In this regard, the oil recovery potential of seawater (SW), reservoir... 

The study of salt tolerance mechanisms in halophyte plants can provide valuable information for crop breeding and plant engineering programs. The aim of the present study was to investigate whole transcriptome analysis of Aeluropus littoralis in response to salinity stress (200 and 400 mM NaCl) by de novo RNA-sequencing. To assemble the transcriptome, Trinity v2.4.0 and Bridger tools, were comparatively used with two k-mer sizes (25 and 32 bp). The de novo assembled transcriptome by Bridger (k-mer 32) was chosen as final assembly for subsequent analysis. In general, 103290 transcripts were obtained. The differential expression analysis (log2 FC > 1 and FDR < 0.01) showed that 1861... 

Enhanced Oil Recovery from carbonate reservoirs is a major challenge especially in naturally fractured formations where spontaneous imbibition is a main driving force. The Low Salinity Water Injection (LSWI) method has been suggested as one of the promising methods for enhanced oil recovery. However, the literature suggests that LSWI method, due to high dependence on rock mineralogy, injected and formation water salt concentration, and complexity of reactions is not a well-established technology in oil recovery from carbonate reservoirs. The underlying mechanism of LSWI is still not fully understood. Due to lack of LSWI study in free clay dolomite fractured reservoir, and to investigate of... 

Wettability alteration is the principal low-salinity-effect (LSE) in many oil-brine-rock (OBR) systems. Our recent experimental results have demonstrated that wettability alteration by low salinity is slow. It is expected that the electrical behavior of oil/brine and rock/brine interfaces and the water film geometry control both the transient hydrodynamic pressure, and the time-scale of ionic transport in the film, thus the kinetics and degree of wettability alteration. In this paper, the electro-diffusion process induced by the imposed ionic strength gradient is simulated by solving Poisson-Nernst-Planck equations in a water film bound between two charged surfaces, using a finite... 

Soil salinity threatens agricultural production worldwide by constraining plant growth and final crop yield. The early stages are most sensitive to salinity, in response to which salicylic acid (SA) has demonstrated beneficial effects in various plant species. Based on this, a maize (Zea mays L.) pot experiment was set up combining three levels of soil salinity (0, 6 and 12 dS m–1), obtained through NaCl addition, with three levels of SA (0, 300 and 600 mM), applied by leaf spraying 20 days after seedling emergence. Fifteen days later, the following traits were assessed: morphology (plant height, leaf number), growth (root and shoot dry weight), leaf water status [relative water content...