An Improved Multievaporator Adsorption Desalination Cycle for Gulf Cooperation Council Countries

Abstract

In Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, cogeneration‐based desalination processes consume almost 25 % of the total annual energy, and this number increases annually by 2.2 %. The high demand for fresh water can be attributed to the high gross domestic product growth rate, 24 %, and high water languishes, which are more than 10 %. Over the past two decades, GCC countries have spent tens of billions of dollars to expand their present and planned desalination capacities. It is foreseeable that with a business‐as‐usual scenario, the domestic oil consumption of Saudi Arabia may exceed its production capacity by 2040. Innovative and sustainable water production solutions are urgently needed for future water supplies without an environment impact. In this paper, a hybrid desalination cycle is proposed by integrating a cascade evaporator (CE) system with an adsorption (AD) cycle. In this new innovative cycle, desorbed vapors from the AD are supplied to the CE to exploit the latent condensation energy within the evaporators arranged in both pressure and temperature cascades to improve the performance ratio of the cycle. Water production is improved more than tenfold with the hybrid cycle relative to that observed for the conventional AD cycle owing to a synergetic effect. This concept is demonstrated in a laboratory pilot plant with a cascade of three evaporators and simulation of eight evaporators.

Toward a Sustainable Decentralized Water Supply: Review of Adsorption Desorption Desalination (ADD) and Current Technologies: Saudi Arabia (SA) as a Case Study

“…It was found that system recovery increased by about 25% compared to a single-stage RO system. Another type of hybrid system was studied in [112], presenting a mathematical model for a MED+RO and ADD system called MEDADRO, a hybrid thermal-membrane desalination configuration. A thermo-economic analysis was conducted, and it was found that the permeate water flow rate increased by 65.5%, and the price of producing water was reduced by 38.4% with respect to the basic configuration.…”

Desalination Processes’ Efficiency and Future Roadmap

“…Recent hybridization trend of different desalination processes to overcome the individual processes limitations have ability to achieve SUPR ≈ 170 and energy efficiency up to 20% of TL [ 56 , 57 , 58 , 59 , 60 , 61 , 62 , 63 , 64 , 65 , 66 , 67 ], Kudus to the thermodynamic synergy between cycles. There is a need for more innovative processes that could maximize the input fuel exergy to boost water production, and it is plausible for process design to achieve up to 30% of TL, meeting the goals of sustainable seawater desalination.…”

Design of Industrial Falling Film Evaporators

“…They developed this correlation for pure water at saturation temperature ranges from 322 to 393 K. It can be noticed that there are two major gaps in available literature; firstly, no data is available for evaporation heat transfer for below 322 K and secondly, there is lack of data for salt solution as boiling point elevation changes with salt concentration. These two factors are important for processes industries falling film evaporators design as most of processes are performed below 322 K such as in food and desalination industries [30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42]. This was the main motivation of this study, to provide detailed parameters for falling film evaporators design for process industries.…”