Question

To gain an appreciation of the water consumption needs for a modest city such as Gainesville, we will consider converting UF's football stadium or the O'Connell Center into a water reservoir. Each group should divide into two teams (sub-group A and B), with each sub-group answering the following questions in a short report to be posted on Canvas by one of the Co- Captains before 5:00pm on the due date. Formatting guidelines are attached Calculate how many days of water can be stored in the Ben Hill Griffin Reservoir (Group A) or the O'Connell Center Reservoir (Group B). Assume that the exits can be perfectly sealed, that the open sections can be readily filled in and that the structure will support the stadium/arena being filled to the top with water. Use average daily water consumption rates for Gainesville per Gainesville Regional Utilities (GRU) published values. Report your calculated total reservoir capacity (gallons), and then your days of water supply to two significant figures. 2. As many regions of the world run out of sources of fresh water, desalination becomes a leading technology to produce fresh water from sea water or brackish water. A very common technology is multi-stage flash distillation (https:/en.wikipedia org wiki Multi stage flash distillation). Assume your reservoir was filled with sea water; calculate how much energy would be required to distill the entire reservoir using multi-stage flash distillation. If a this energy was supplied by burning gasoline, how many gallons of gasoline would be required? You may assume 100% of the gasoline's available energy content would be used for the distillation process. Assuming you can purchase gasoline for $2.5 gallon, calculate the cost to distill your reservoir, reporting your final cost as dollars per KGA of water (KGA 1000 gallons). Only consider the cost of your gasoline (i.e. ignore all other capital and operating costs). Compare this energy cost to the current GRU residential cost of water of about $2.35 per KGA and discuss briefly. Include comments on how changes in our assumptions would impact this analysis

please solve #2 with some assumption. #1 is just to get some idea about the problem.
thanks!

Answer 1

Multi Stage Flash distillation is one of the most common methods for desalination. In this method, vaporisation of sea water takes place at low temperatures in vaccum. The water vapours then condense to form fresh water. The boiling point of water is low in vaccum, thus less energy is required for this process.

Assumptions:

1.Energy required for the process is supplied by burning gasoline.

2.All of the gasoline's available energy content would be used i.e. 100%.

3.cost of gasoline=$2.5/gallon.

As we know that the energy content of gasoline is 120 Mj/gallon.

The total energy requirement is in the order of 17 kilowatt hour per m³.