Abstract
Human civilization uses vast quantities of water and electricity. Natural fresh water is in short supply in many regions, and the shortfall is increasingly filled through energy-intensive desalination. Electricity still largely comes from burning fossil fuels, resulting in CO2 emissions. Concentrator photovoltaics (CPV) can provide not only electricity but also heat from cooling of the CPV cells, providing additional energy for thermally driven processes such as desalination. This paper evaluates a CPV receiver cooling arrangement for linear CPV systems which maximizes electricity production for a given CPV cell area while supplying heat byproduct boosted to a temperature higher than the temperature of the fluid that cools the CPV cells, increasing the range of processes to which the heat can be applied.
Highlights
Water is a necessity for all life, and human civilization uses vast quantities of water for food production and industry as well as for domestic use
In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), food production uses over 80% of the total water consumed [1]; the Kingdom still imports more than 80% of the food it consumes [2], so KSA could use far more water if more were available
With a trough’s lower concentration, the less-intense edges of the focus would have low thermal efficiency at the high heat-transfer fluid temperatures used for traditional solar thermal power generation (∼400°C, [13]), but the temperatures involved in most thermal desalination are low enough that thermal losses from the focal edges are low compared to the heat flux available even in these less-intense focal edges
Summary
Water is a necessity for all life, and human civilization uses vast quantities of water for food production and industry as well as for domestic use. 2. Photovoltaic/Thermal Hybrids ermal desalination requires more energy than reverse osmosis to produce a given amount of fresh water, but most of the energy needed is in the form of low-grade heat rather than valuable electricity. With a trough’s lower concentration, the less-intense edges of the focus would have low thermal efficiency at the high heat-transfer fluid temperatures used for traditional solar thermal power generation (∼400°C, [13]), but the temperatures involved in most thermal desalination (e.g., multieffect distillation at 90°C [6] and even multistage flash at 120°C [14]) are low enough that thermal losses from the focal edges are low compared to the heat flux available even in these less-intense focal edges. Antifreeze is often not needed in a hot region like KSA, and the small amounts of anticorrosion agent and antifouling agent (e.g., OptiShield) added to water used as coolant have little effect on the coolant’s performance
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