Evaporator

#This application is a U.S. National Stage application of PCT/AU2017/050804 filed 1 Aug. 2017, the entire disclosure of which is hereby incorporated by reference in their entirety.

#This invention relates to a water purification plant which removes impurities by evaporating and condensing potable water and leaving waste residue.

#One of the most commonly used methods of purifying water is by passing a feed stream through reverse osmosis filters and producing a potable stream free of impurities and a concentrated waste stream. However this method is limited to feed streams containing at most 4% of impurities and cannot deal with higher concentrations.

#Further features of the present invention are more fully described in the following description of several non-limiting embodiments thereof. This description is included solely for the purposes of exemplifying the present invention. It should not be understood as a restriction on the broad summary, disclosure or description of the invention as set out above. The description will be made with reference to the accompanying drawings in which:

#FIG. 1 is a schematic illustrating an embodiment of a shell and tube heat exchanger of the present invention;

#FIG. 2 shows the detail of the dual phase nozzles and manifolds and the shell and tube heat exchanger of FIG. 1;

#With reference to FIGS. 1 and 2, a first embodiment of the present invention is illustrated where a filtered water stream 1 is fed into plate heat exchanger 2 at ambient temperature. The plate heat exchanger 2 raises the water stream's temperature to about 99° C. From the plate heat exchanger 2 the water is then fed to water manifold 3 and steam is fed from compressor 4 into steam manifold 5. Additionally, steam from compressor 4 is fed into the shell of shell and tube heat exchanger 7.

#Both water manifold 3 and steam manifold 5 feed into dual phase nozzles 23 which spray super-heated feed water and steam 24 into vertical tubes 26 of shell and tube heat exchanger 7. This causes rapid expansion of feed water into steam 27 with the release of solid waste 28. Steam from shell 7 is condensed by trap 6 and the distillate is fed back through plate heat exchanger 2 and delivered at ambient temperature.

#Mist eliminators 8 filter remaining steam 27 and it is extracted by and recycled to compressor 4. Waste is collected in output 9 which attaches to two stage hopper 10 which utilizes reciprocating dump cups to ensure neither loss of steam nor air suction to output 9.