The ZLD approach is crucial for water and wastewater treatment. It is a significant technology that will be adopted by a vast industries around the world. However, ZLD technology can be very energy consuming, therefore research on reducing energy consumption and improving process efficiency is now very important.
Each type of the desalination system, which treat the brackish water, sea water, boiler blow down water, cooling tower blown down water or industrial process wastewater produces the desalinated water and the concentrated brine. In many cases, the concentrated brine cannot be discharged directly to the outfall or the other reject point, because proper treatment has to be provided to prevent negative consequences for the environment. In that case, it is possible to use ZLD technology to achieve a Zero Liquid Discharge (ZLD) effect, which converts the concentrated brine into distillate and solid salt.