Design and modeling of vertical tube evaporator in a thermal-driven multiple effect distillation system

The scarcity of freshwater is one of the biggest issues in the world, as a result of which more attention is given to the thermal distillation process for seawater and as well as brackish water distillation which removes almost all types of contaminants. Distillation is a phase change process in which steam is used as a heat source for evaporating the feed water. Multiple-effect distillation makes the process economical by recycling the latent heat of vaporization. In this paper, the vertical tube evaporator (VTE) design and modeled for MED for estimating the overall heat transfer coefficient by using the developed correlations of the Bell method, Kandlikar, and Kutateladze and compared its previous work in literature. The result shows good agreement with previous work and reliability in design. The developed model can be used to design the VTE for estimating the dimension for large-scale to micro-scale MED plant.