Which is the most common water desalination process?

Question

There are about 7500 salt to freah water desalination plants in the world. Which is the most common process...reverse osmosis or distillation?

Answer 1

I think they almost always use reverse osmosis.  Distillation is more expensive in that the equipment has a very slow rate of producing pure water.

Answer 2

I would say distillation (MSF is THE most common desalination technology) based on tons of stuff I have researched a few years ago (the first link below might give you a good summary).

MSF can use the thermal energy pretty decent in efficiency, easy to build, gives high quality water and pretty rugged against scale formation and impurities. RO is an energy efficient technology but suffers high costs for the membranes, high maintenance costs, doesn't use thermal energy well, impurity levels are higher and so on.

Me personally, a fan of vapour compression desalination and not many people seem to use it though (what a shame... :-)).

http://www.twdb.state.tx.us/Desalination...

http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cp...

http://www.medrc.org/new_content/industr...