Abstract
Water shortage is a burden on governments with the significant increase in population and industrial activities. There is an urgent need to devise innovative systems for providing potable water with low production costs. The availability of seawater around the world with the presence of desalination technologies can offer various solutions. A novel air gap membrane/humidification-dehumidification (AGMD/HDH) hybrid system was designed and implemented to produce distilled water. The influence of operational parameters on the hybrid process was studied in detail. Freshwater productivity gained output ratio (GOR), energy efficiency, specific thermal energy consumption (STEC), and feasibility study was investigated to optimize the process. Air flowrate, seawater feed temperature, and water flow rate were ranged from 100 kg/h to 250 kg/h, 40 °C, 65 °C, and 240 L/h to 600 L/h, respectively. The hybrid system produced freshwater of 24.4 kg/h at optimum conditions. The leading performance indicators were 6.8 for GOR, energy efficiency (80%), and 240 kWh/m3 for STEC. Humidification-dehumidification (HDH) system was mainly powered by low-grade energy power, so the proposed hybrid system was able to recover heat loss from the operation of the air gap membrane desalination (AGMD) unit. The cost estimation of distilled water is 9.34 US $/m3 with an annual production rate of 210.62 m3/year. The proposed hybrid air gap membrane distillation/humidification–dehumidification units showed remarkable improvement in total water productivity at a low cost.
Published Version
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