The shortage of fresh water resources is a global problem which requires a prompt solution. Thus, the multi effect distillation (MED) was successfully used for the production of fresh water from seawater. Despite the use of MED desalination system extensively, the influence of the number of effects on the fresh water production cost has not been covered in the open literature. Thus, this paper tries to rectify this specific challenge via simulation at given operating conditions of seawater salinity and temperature. The study is performed using a detailed mathematical model contains the suitable cost correlations. gPROMS model builder suite has been used to carry out an extensive simulation. The results of the study show that the lowest fresh water production cost can be achieved at an optimal number of effects of 17 for a certain operating conditions.

淡水资源的短缺是一个全球性问题，需要迅速解决。因此，多效蒸馏（MED）成功地用于从海水中生产淡水。尽管广泛使用MED海水淡化系统，但公开文献尚未涵盖影响数量对淡水生产成本的影响。因此，本文试图通过在给定的海水盐度和温度操作条件下进行仿真来纠正这一具体挑战。使用包含适当成本相关性的详细数学模型进行研究。gPROMS模型构建器套件已用于进行广泛的仿真。