A new visual library for modeling and simulation of renewable energy desalination systems (REDS)

A new visual library for design and simulation of solar desalination systems (SDS)

Novel Tri Hybrid Desalination Plants

Current progress in integrated solar desalination systems: Prospects from coupling configurations to energy conversion and desalination processes

Reliable production of freshwater and energy is vital for tackling two of the most critical issues the world is facing today: climate change and sustainable development. In this light, a comprehensive review is performed on the foremost renewable energy-driven polygeneration systems for freshwater production using thermal and membrane desalination. Thus, this review is designed to outline the latest developments on integrated polygeneration and desalination systems based on multi-stage flash (MSF), multi-effect distillation (MED), humidification-dehumidification (HDH), and reverse osmosis (RO) technologies. Special attention is paid to innovative approaches for modelling, design, simulation, and optimization to improve energy, exergy, and thermo-economic performance of decentralized polygeneration plants accounting for electricity, space heating and cooling, domestic hot water, and freshwater production, among others. Different integrated renewable energy-driven polygeneration and desalination systems are investigated, including those assisted by solar, biomass, geothermal, ocean, wind, and hybrid renewable energy sources. In addition, recent literature applying energy, exergy, exergoeconomic, and exergoenvironmental analysis is reviewed to establish a comparison between a range of integrated renewable-driven polygeneration and desalination systems.

This work presents a detailed thermo-economic analysis of unit water costs from dual-purpose cogeneration plants. The power levelized cost was first calculated for stand-alone steam, nuclear, and combined-cycle power plants. The cost of energy needed to operate the desalination systems connected to power plants was evaluated based on two different approaches: power- and heat-allocated methods. Numerical models based on the heat and mass balances of the power and desalination plants’ components were developed and validated. Comprehensive and updated data generated using Desaldata libraries were correlated to estimate the capital, labor, overhead, and maintenance costs for different desalination systems. The levelized water cost produced by multi-effect distillation, multi-effect distillation with vapor compression, multi-stage flash, and reverse osmosis systems connected to different power plants was estimated. The impact of various controlling parameters, including the price of natural gas, nuclear power plant installation cost, and the desalination capacity on water cost, was investigated. For all simulated cases, the levelized water cost evaluated using the heat-allocated method was found to be lower by 25–30% compared to that estimated using the power-allocated method. The cost of water produced using reverse osmosis remains below that produced by other desalination technologies. However, using the heat-allocated method to estimate the levelized water cost narrows the gap between the costs of water produced by multi-effect distillation and that produced by seawater reverse osmosis. The results also show that the use of the multi-effect distillation process in a cogeneration configuration rather than multi-effect distillation with vapor compression can result in a lower water cost. The profit analysis shows slight differences between the profit of a power plant connected to a reverse osmosis system and the profit of a power plant connected to a plain multi-effect distillation system.

Desalination is probably the only means for fresh water supply to countries in decertified climate. The majority of GCC counties rely on desalinated water for fresh water supply to major cities. Over 70% of the desalinated water in the GCC comes from thermal desalination plants including Multi Stage Flash (MSF) and Multi Effect Distillation (MED). The new trend in the desalination plant in the GCC is 30% Reverse Osmosis (RO) and 70% thermal. However, these percentages vary from one to another country depending on feed water quality and expertise. For example, Oman Sea has lower salinity than the Gulf water and hence Oman uses more RO for desalination than MED and MSF. This decision is also driven by economy as RO process less energy intensive and hence the produced water is less expensive as compared to thermal plants. On the contrary, Qatar and Kuwait use more MSF followed by MED due to the high salinity and low quality feed water. This is also because trials of RO in both Qatar and Kuwait were not successful because of the problems of membrane fouling and restrict pre-treatment requirements due to the quality of the water intake.The advantages of RO over thermal technologies are well known in terms of lower energy consumption and the cost of produced water; but are not yet taken advantage of in the GCC zone. One of the reasons is blamed on high feed water salinity and bad water quality; other reasons such as lack of experience, red tides and reliability are contributed to the dominance of thermal plants. However, field experience showed that good pretreatment and optimized RO design may overcome the problems of high feed salinity and bad water quality. Several RO plants, such as Fujairah in UAE, are good examples of a working RO technology in the harsh water environment. Good RO design includes design and optimization of both pretreatment and post-treatment. Field experience showed that most of RO plants failure was due to inefficient pretreatment which resulted in providing low quality water to the RO membrane that caused fouling. Fouling, including biological and scaling, can be handled once an efficient pretreatment process is available. Recent advances in pre-treatment techniques include the combination of Forward Osmosis (FO) with RO among other methods. Recent studies by the authors including commercial implantations have shown that the combination of FO with RO addresses the most technical challenge of RO process and that is fouling, which results in lower energy consumption and less chemical additives. Experience showed fouling in FO process in reversible, i.e. can be removed by backlashing while fouling in conventional RO process is irreversible.In this study, the feasibility of integrating FO with RO process for the desalting of the Gulf water in Qatar is presented. The results are expressed in terms of specific energy consumption, process recovery, produced water quality, chemical additives and overall process cost.The implementation of RO for desalination is not only reducing the cost of desalination but also the environmental impact. More R&D should be done to provide useful data about RO application and suitability for the Gulf water. The R&D should be focused on laboratory to market development of RO technology using rigorous lab scale and pilot plant testing program.

Performance analysis of hybrid system of multi effect distillation and reverse osmosis for seawater desalination via modelling and simulation

Renewable energy systems for water desalination applications: A comprehensive review

Various hybrid desalination systems have been proposed during the last two decades to improve the produced water quality, energy efficiency, water production rate and sustainability among others, receiving therefore a rapid industrial implementation. Desalination processes are energy intensive and this energy is mostly provided by fossil fuels, especially for large scale commercial plants. No doubt, the use of renewable energy (RE) sources is a way forward to decrease the environmental and related health impact to produce and supply freshwater in remote regions with severe water shortage and an unfavourable or unfeasible connection to the public electrical grid. However, most installed renewable energy desalination plants have small capacities, yet facing several issues for long term operation. Therefore, this study restricts to the use of fossil fuel based energy source for desalination and provides a thorough analysis summarising the design, operation, and performance, techno-economic and associated challenges of hybrid seawater desalination systems based on several experimental/real plant and simulation studies reported since 2000. It includes mature membrane-based and thermal-based desalination technologies, namely Reverse Osmosis (RO), multistage flash (MSF), and multi-effect distillation (MED), and a number of emerging hybrid membrane-thermal water desalination technologies. Future opportunities in hybrid systems, including RO/MSF and RO/MED are also highlighted.

Libya, like many arid countries, relies heavily on groundwater resources, which are increasingly scarce. With a 1950 km Mediterranean coastline offering an abundant but highly saline water source (35,000 38,000 ppm), seawater desalination is essential to meet national water demands. This study presents a techno-economic evaluation of three desalination technologies—Reverse Osmosis (RO), Multi-Stage Flash (MSF), and Multi-Effect Distillation (MED)—for a 1200 m³/day plant. RO design was conducted using ROSA software, while MSF and MED were modeled thermodynamically.RO requires significantly lower seawater intake (117 m³/h) compared to MSF (475.7 m³/h) and MED (200 m³/h), with corresponding plant efficiencies of 43%, 10.5%, and 25%. RO produces potable water (190 ppm TDS), while MSF and MED yield ultra-pure water (~50 ppm TDS), necessitating remineralization. RO operates without steam input, unlike MSF and MED (7.3 m³/h steam), and demands 235 kW of electrical power versus 245 kW (plus steam) for MSF and 50 kW (plus 7.5 m³/h steam) for MED. RO’s high brine pressure (53.5 bar) enables energy recovery, whereas MSF and MED discharge warm brine at low pressure, posing environmental challenges. Economically, unit water costs are $0.37/m³ for RO, $1.52/m³ for MSF, and $1.21/m³ for MED. Overall, RO is the most technically and economically viable option for this capacity under Libyan conditions.

Chapter 8 - Solar Desalination Systems

Chapter 8 - Solar Desalination Systems

Application of artificial intelligence techniques for modeling, optimizing, and controlling desalination systems powered by renewable energy resources

Hybrid solar desalination systems driven by parabolic trough and parabolic dish CSP technologies: Technology categorization, thermodynamic performance and economical assessment

Fresh water production is one of the main concerns in the new century. Population grows fast and potable water resources are decreased. In the other hand energy crises would also be another issue that must be well addressed by the politicians and also scientists. Developing desalination plant with using renewable energy (particularly solar energy) is one of the important options to overcome these concerns. Thus many researchers have been working on different desalination plants to find the best conditions and to realize the most efficient performances for different cycles. Different approaches have been used to achieve the most efficient conditions or to find the optimum operation and design conditions. Some of the researchers used parametric study approach while many other adopted different conventional optimization algorithms for these tasks. The algorithms such as gradient based algorithm, genetic algorithm, search and pattern algorithm and neural network method have been used in the field of desalination. For instance; Ophir and Lokiec (2005) described the design principles of a MED plant and various energy considerations that result in an economical MED process and plant. Kamali and Mohebbinia (2007) showed that parametric study as one of the optimization methods on thermo-hydraulic data strongly helps to increase GOR value inside MED-TVC systems. Shamel and Chung (2006) used parametric study to find the optimum condition of a Reverse Osmosis (RO) system for sea water desalination. Metaiche et al (2008) developed optimization software, Desaltop, for RO system for water desalination. They used genetic algorithm to find suitable operating parameters and also to find appropriate type of membrane. Al-Shayji (1998) used neural network method for optimization of large-scale commercial desalination plants. Djebedjian et al. (2008) used genetic algorithm for optimization of a reverse osmosis desalination system. Mussati et al. (2003) used an evolutionary algorithm for the optimization of Multi Stage Flash (MSF) system. Finding the optimum conditions is a major challenge on the desalination plant studies. The plant performance depends on several different variables and constraints that need exhausting efforts to find the optimum conditions. This chapter introduces Design of Experiment (DOE) method as a statistical tool for optimization of desalination systems. Thus two different desalination plants; Multi-Effect Desalination (MED) system and solar desalination using humidification–dehumidification cycle (SDHD) have been considered to show the ability of DOE method for optimizing such systems. These both desalination plants could use the low graded heating energy sources