DESENVOLVIMENTO DE UM SISTEMA DE DESTILAÇÃO DE ÁGUA EM CICLO FECHADO E SUBMETIDO À DESTILAÇÃO DE ÁGUA COM ELEVADA DUREZA

Abstract

Humanity's great challenge is to reconcile its development with the maintenance of natural resources, so that successive generations have the same access. Fresh water is one of the most important natural resources, and its use must be constantly improved. In relation to this, the distiller apparatus of the laboratories of the Instituto Federal Farroupilha, work discarding the water that is left over from the process. This type of distiller discards approximately 50 L of potable water to distill 1 L of water. The volume of disposal is very high considering monthly or annual numbers of waste, which implies spending public resources and misuse of water resources. The town of São Vicente do Sul (Brazil/RS), has water with high hardness, around 15 times greater than cities very close to it. The high hardness of the water drastically increases the distiller's cleaning frequency and reduces the durability of its electrical resistance. To minimize these two issues, a closed cycle system was built, in which the water that enters the distiller and the one that leaves, as disposal, is the same contained in a 210 L reservoir. A water pump sends the water from the reservoir to the distiller, and the volume of distilled water leaves this system and generates the need to replace water in the reservoir. This study also compared the proposed system with an open system and evaluated the durability of the distiller.