Low-temperature solar-thermal multi-effect evaporation desalination systems

Abstract

SUMMARYAs part of a project investigating the productive use of saline land and the development of sustainable desalination systems, the production of potable water from seawater or brackish water using desalination systems powered by lowtemperature solar-thermal sources, including salinity-gradient solar ponds and evacuated tube solar collectors, has been studied. A Visual Basic-Excel computer model of solar-powered multi-effect evaporation (MEE) desalination processes was developed to determine the technical and economic feasibility of the system. A small-scale three-effect evaporation desalination system powered by a solar pond, capable of producing up to 2300 L of fresh water per day, has been designed using the model. The system has been manufactured and commissioned, and has operated effectively at a first-effect vapour temperature of about 681C, which is ideal for heat delivery from a solar pond. One of the advantages of the MEE-Solar pond arrangement is the possibility of utilising the discharged concentrated salt solutions from the MEE system for commercial salt production, or constructing additional solar ponds to support additional desalination capacity. The key design and operating parameters controlling the cost of fresh water-distillate production, recovery ratio, thermal energy, and solar collection area-were determined from the computer simulation and compared with experimental results. A good agreement between the experimental data and the modelling results has been obtained.

Tools for the Control of Modern Solar-Thermal Heating Plants

“…ST Heating Unit: Tools electric energy, and solar-thermal (ST ) systems, which usually generate heat. In terms of the latter branch, it has to be remarked that low-temperature ST schemes are widely used in the industry, with various applications, as those in Leblanc et al (2010); Bujedo et al (2011); Marc et al (2012) and Rosiek and Batlles (2009).…”

Concentrating Solar Power and Desalination Plants

“…The model was able to predict the distillate production and specific heat consumption for each operating condition with reasonable accuracy. Leblanc et al (2010) implemented the modelling of a pilot MED plant fed by hot water from a solar pond, using a Visual Basic-Excel environment. The model was used for plant design and the agreement between the experimental and simulation results was found to be good.…”

Multi‐criteria thermoeconomic and thermodynamic assessments of the desalination‐integrated two‐phase liquid‐immersion data center cooling system

“…10 Besides the above-mentioned waste heat recovery techniques, the seawater desalination by using the waste heat (steam) of data center cooling systems has also been proposed as an idea by Ebrahimi et al 11 However, the modeling and performance assessment details were not given in that study. In fact, integration of the desalination process is a widely-proposed approach for different energy systems such as nuclear power plants, 12 marine energy and industry, 13,14 solar energy, 15,16 fuel cell and gas turbine 17 and thermoelectric coolers. 18 Those studies inferred that low-temperature energy systems can be efficiently combined with the desalination process.…”