Performance enhancement of compound parabolic concentrating vaporized desalination system by spraying and steam heat recovery

Abstract

This paper employs the compound parabolic concentrator to heat the thermal conduction oil as working fluid to a higher temperature. The feed water is sprayed and obtains heat from the working fluid in evaporation chamber. The spraying of feed water enhances heat and mass transfer and increases the vaporization intensity. The latent heat of steam is recovered to preheat the feed water which improves energy utilization. Multivariate orthogonal experiments were conducted to obtain the optimized nozzle arrangement in the evaporation chamber. Numerical simulations were performed to evaluate the effect of nozzle parameters on liquid film thickness and water production performance. In system performance experiments, the heat loss, heat recovery performance, fresh water production and gain output ratio in sunny weather were achieved. The daily fresh water production of the system was 15.1 kg with a maximum rate of 4.32 kg/h. The nozzle group arrangement optimization increases the fresh water production by 28.12 % and the maximum rate was 8.48 %. The heat recovery unit increases fresh water production by 13.18 %, with an average heat recovery efficiency of 0.85.