Renewable Energy-Driven Desalination Hybrids for Sustainability

Abstract

The expansion trend of current desalination processes is expected to boost brine rejection to 240 km 3 and CO 2 emission to 400 million tons per year by 2050. This high brine rejection and CO 2 emission rates are copping COP21 goal, maintaining temperature rise below 2°C. An innovative and energy-efficient process/material is required to achieve Paris Agreement targets. Highly efficient adsorbent cycle integration is proposed with well-proven conventional desalination processes to improve energy efficiency and to reduce environmental and marine pollution. The adsorbent cycle is operated with solar or low-grade industrial waste heat, available in abundance in water stress regions. The proposed integration with membrane processes will save 99% energy and over 150% chemical rejection to sea. In case of thermally driven cycles, the proposed hybridization will improve energy efficiency to 39% and will reduce over 80% chemical rejection. This can be one solution to achieve Paris Agreement (COP21) targets for climate control that can be implemented in near future.

Performance investigation of MEMSYS vacuum membrane distillation system in single effect and multi-effect mode

“…Moreover, the conventional design of thermal based desalination systems offers very high capital cost of US$2000/m 3 , like MED (multi-effect desalination, water cost: 0.52-8.0US$/m 3 ) and MSF (multi-stage flashing) [26][27][28] as the manufacturers of such systems are packing the evaporators and condensers with high tube density, to increase the overall heat transfer area for high thermal performance, resulting in higher fabrication cost. Such complex design also leads to high maintenance and are susceptible to corrosion and fouling, due to inaccessibility between the surfaces of such highly packed tubes [29-31].…”

Performance Evaluation of Desalination Technologies at Common Energy Platform

“…The authors have conducted an experimental study at KAUST of a hybrid approach involving the well-proven heat driven MED-TVC processes with an adsorption (AD) cycle, arranged in a back-to-back manner [12,[22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31]. A quantum jump in the energy efficiency is achieved through the thermodynamic integration of two thermally-driven with two salient consequences, namely (i) an increase in the available temperature differences between the top to bottom brine temperatures and hence more MED stages could be inserted, and (ii) an opportunity to scavenge more enthalpy from the seawater feed by liquid flashing in the lower stages of MED where the corresponding stage temperatures were below ambient.…”

A review of recent advances in adsorption desalination technologies

“…Further mathematical and experimental modeling resulted in a performance ratio of 0.8-1.1 with producing SDWP of 3-5 m 3 per tonne of silica gel per day at a temperature of 7-10 °C. Consequently, a low-grade heat-driven adsorbent cycle integrated with membrane processes can ensure 150% of chemical rejection and ensure about 99% energy-saving [148]. Furthermore, as renewable energies are environment friendly having no negative impact, the desalination systems are driven by renewable technologies to ensure the future sustainability of water supplies [149].…”