Gas hydrate (GH)-based desalination process have a potential as a novel unit desalination process. GHs are nonstoichiometric crystalline inclusion compounds formed at low temperature and a high pressure condition by water and a number of guest gas molecules. After formation, pure GHs are separated from the remaining concentrated seawater and they are dissociated into guest gas and pure water in a low temperature and a high pressure condition. The condition of GH formation is different depending on the type of guest gas. This is the reason why the guest gas is a key to success of GH desalination process. The salt rejection of GH based desalination process appeared 60.5-93%, post treatment process is needed to finally meet the product water quality. This study adopted reverse osmosis (RO) as a post treatment. However, the test about gas rejection by RO process have to be performed because the guest gas will be dissolved in a GH product (RO feed). In this research, removal potential of dissolved gas by RO process is performed using lab-scale RO system and GC/MS analysis. The relation between RO membrane characteristics and gas removal rate were analyzed based on the GC/MS measurement.

Gas hydrate desalination process is based on a liquid to solid (Gas Hydrate, GH) phase change followed by a physical process to separate the GH from the remaining salty water. The GH based desalination process show 60.5-90% of salt rejection, post treatment like reverse osmosis (RO) process is needed to finally meet the product water quality. In this study, the energy consumption of the GH and RO hybrid system was investigated. The energy consumption of the GH process is based on the cooling and heating of seawater and the heat of GH formation reaction while RO energy consumption is calculated using the product of pressure and flow rate of high pressure pumps used in the process. The relation between minimum energy consumption of RO process and RO recovery depending on GH salt rejection, and (2) energy consumption of electric based GH process can be calculated from the simulation. As a result, energy consumption of GH-RO hybrid system and conventional seawater RO process (with/without enregy recovery device) is compared. Since the energy consumption of GH process is too high, other solution used seawater heat and heat exchanger instead of electric energy is suggested.

Gas hydrates are crystalline solids in which gas molecules (guests) are trapped in water cavities (hosts) that are composed of hydrogen-bonded water molecules. During the formation of gas hydrates in seawater, the equilibria and kinetics are then affected by salinity. In this study, the effects of salinity on the equilibria of CO2 and R134-a gas hydrates has been investigated by tracing the changes of operating temperature and pressure. Increasing the salinity by 1.75% led to a drop in the equilibrium temperature of about 2 oC for CO2 gas hydrate and 0.38 oC for R-134a gas hydrate at constant equilibrium pressure; in other words, there were rises in the equilibrium pressure of about 1 bar and 0.25 bar at constant equilibrium temperature, respectively. The kinetics of gas hydrate formation have also been investigated by time-resolved in-situ Raman spectroscopy; the results demonstrate that the increase of salinity delayed the formation of both CO2 and R134-a gas hydrates. Therefore, various ions in seawater can play roles of inhibitors for gas hydrate formation in terms of both equilibrium and kinetics.

This paper presents the results of the electrochemical treatment of chemical oxygen demand(COD) and total nitrogen(T-N) compounds in the wastewater generated from flue gas desulfurization process by using a lab-scale electrolyzer. With the increase in the applied current from 0.6 Ah/L to 1.2 Ah/L, the COD removal efficiency rapidly increases from 74.5% to 96%, and the T-N removal efficiency slightly increases from 37.2% to 44.9%. Therefore, it is expected that an electrochemical treatment technique will be able to decrease the amount of chemicals used for reducing the COD and T-N in wastewater of the desulfurization process compared to the conventional chemical treatment technique.