Exergy efficiency enhancement of MSF desalination by heat recovery from hot distillate water stages

Exergy Analysis of a Two-Pass Reverse Osmosis (RO) Desalination Unit with and without an Energy Recovery Turbine (ERT) and Pressure Exchanger (PX)

“…The overall RO exergy efficiency is defined as the ratio of the minimum separation work required to the total input exergy [19,26]:…”

New MED based desalination process for low grade waste heat

“…One of the key obstacles to the extensive use of desalination is its large energy consumption. Multi-Effect Distillation (MED) and Multi-Stage Flash (MSF) are examples of thermal desalination and require high thermal energy consumption [10,11]. Also, the high overall efficiency of the reverse osmosis process is at the expense of high operating costs stemming from consuming a large amount of electricity (4-5 kWh/m 3 ) with energy recovery and problems in the pretreatment section due to seasonal algal blooms, high biological activity, and turbidity.…”

Special issue: Sustainable thermal energy management in the process industries international conference (SusTEM2011)

“…Both approaches are more efficient compared to the conventional reverse osmosis approach. Al-Weshahi et al [7] describes an exergy analysis of a multi-stage flash desalination plant which recovers waste heat from hot distillate water during operation and concludes that this can improve exergy efficiency by up to 14%. Taking into account the heating profile and steel price fluctuations over time, Ammar et al [8] evaluate the transportation of heat using a waterammonia based adsorption system and described a system which can transport low grade heat from a heat source as low as 80 C over 50 km with a payback period of less than 10 years.…”