How does desalination works?

Answer 1

desalination means take the salt out. get sea water heat it up water is evaporated and leaves behind salt. so you have fresh clean water ready to drink. :-) desalination means take the salt out. get sea water heat it up water is evaporated and leaves behind salt. so you have fresh clean water ready to drink. :-)

Answer 2

The process of converting salt water to fresh water is called desalination and there is a lot of information on the subject. The basic process removes dissolved ions from water. (Salt is mostly dissolved sodium and choline ions, but the same process occurs for nearly all inorganic ions.) There are two common methods for separating dissolved ions and leaving nearly pure water.

Mother nature turns salt water into fresh water everyday by evaporation of water from the oceans. Clouds, with water vapor, water droplets and ice crystals form from evaporation. Then, it rains or snows nearly pure water/ice.

When humans artificially create pure water, the water is typically heated to drive the pure water off as water vapor and leave the salts behind. (This is really the same as the evaporation process that Mother Nature uses, but speeded up with artificial heat.) In chemistry, heating a liquid to vaporize it so that it condenses in a purer form is a process is called "distillation".

Another process, more specifically for water, is reverse osmosis filtration through a series of differentially permeable membranes allowing pure water to pass while trapping salts and other impurities. When any process is used to remove salts from seawater, the process is called desalination.

Further technical details can be found by looking at the explanations of the processes of evaporation and reverse osmosis.