Adsorption (AD) cycle is recently pioneered for cooling and desalination applications. For water treatment, the cycle can be used to treat highly concentrated feed water, ranging from seawater, ground water, and chemically laden waste water. This chapter presents a review of the recent development of AD cycle and its hybridization with known conventional cycles such as the MED and MSF. We begin by looking at the basic sorption theory for different adsorbent–adsorbate pairs, namely the silica gel–water and the zeolite–water pairs. Under the IUPAC categorization, there are six types of isotherm behavior that capture almost all types of adsorbent–adsorbate behaviors and many isotherm correlations have been developed to described their uptake patterns, namely the Henry, Langmuir, Toth, etc. We have recently developed a correlation that can universally capture all six types of isotherms of IUPAC and it requires only four regression coefficients.
Part of the book: Desalination Updates