Evaporator No 1 for the Shuweihat S2 seawater desalination plant in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) was shipped by its manufacturer, Doosan Heavy Engineering, on 15 June 2009.
Measuring 28.5 mwide, 11.2 m high, and 100.8 m long, the evaporator is the largest of its kind produced to date. It has the capacity to produce 16.7 MIGD (76,000 m³/d) of distillate. Previously, the 16.3 MIGD evaporator installed in the Al-Shoaiba desalination plant in Saudi Arabia was the largest.
The new evaporator is the first ever to have been produced completely using a Duplex material, which is strongly resistant to erosion and very thin. It will take about 45 days to reach the UAE from Korea.
Evaporators 2 and 3, which are now under construction at Doosan’s Changwon plant, will also be shipped in late June and late July, respectively. The Shuweihat S2 plant will have a total of six evaporators.
The company won the order for the Shuweihat S2 water desalinization plant project, worth about US$ 800 million dollars, from GDF Suez, the developer, in July of last year.
The plant, to be constructed in the Jebel Dana region, about 250 km west of Abu Dhabi, will use multi-stage flash distillation and produce 450,000 m³/d (100 MIGD) of potable water, sufficient to meet the needs of 1.5 million people. Doosan will execute the entire project, including production of materials and equipment, installation and test operation, and complete the plant by August 2011.