THERMAL SCIENCE

International Scientific Journal

THERMODYNAMICAL RESEARCH OF USING SOLAR ENERGY FOR DESALINATION OF SEAWATER

ABSTRACT
Many regions of the world face the problem of saline water. Water desalination processes, which require significant energy consumption, are a common solution to produce drinking water. This study evaluated the influence of the following process operational parameters on the energy consumption of seawater RO systems: water salinity, permeate recovery ratio, membrane performance and feed water temperature. Optimal operational conditions for the theoretical minimum energy consumption were determined with experiments by varying water qualities and operational parameters. In order to further reduce energy consumption a RO system was integrated with a PV solar system and a pilot PVRO system was built and tested. The results obtained from this study indicated that even though a Solar PV system incurs a huge initial capital investment, it will yield significant benefits in the long run of the RO operational period.
KEYWORDS
PAPER SUBMITTED: 2014-12-20
PAPER REVISED: 2015-05-28
PAPER ACCEPTED: 2015-06-01
PUBLISHED ONLINE: 2015-06-07
DOI REFERENCE: https://doi.org/10.2298/TSCI141220074A
CITATION EXPORT: view in browser or download as text file
THERMAL SCIENCE YEAR 2015, VOLUME 19, ISSUE Issue 5, PAGES [1709 - 1721]
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© 2024 Society of Thermal Engineers of Serbia. Published by the Vinča Institute of Nuclear Sciences, National Institute of the Republic of Serbia, Belgrade, Serbia. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International licence