Photovoltaic Powered Desalination System

Abstract

Due to the increasing demand of potable water in many locations around the world, the sea water desalination is now one of the main sources of supplying potable water. The main problem facing water desalination is the energy consumption needed by water desalination process. The depletion of the fossil fuel and its continuous increasing cost accompanied with the increasing demand of potable water, make the problem of supplying potable water more sophisticated. With the continuous decrease of the prices of the PV modules, it is becoming more attractive economically to design a Reverse Osmosis (RO) water desalination system using Photovoltaic (PV) system and it’s friendly to environment if compared to fossil fuel impact. Using RO water desalination technique for desalinate sea water with high salinity (up to 45,000 ppm) into potable water. Instead of depending on conventional fossil fuel, the proposed system depends on solar energy in supplying energy, specifically photovoltaic (PV) systems. In this work a system design and cost analysis for RO water desalination system powered by PV system without, with storage batteries and hybrid system using diesel fuel are presented. Regarding to low efficiency and lifetime of batteries that to be replaced every four years and it’s expensive prices, the main concept is using water desalination system working during days time with a large array size without batteries storage or diesel fuel in order to reduce total system cost . Optimality criterion is the cost per of desalinated water. Keywords: Simulate Reverse Osmosis (RO) plant powered by PV systems, Photovoltaic (PV) System, Reverse osmosis (RO) System-Desalination, Economical analysis, PV Models, Fresh water, Salinity. Paper Publication: Research Paper has been published in the International Journal of Scientific & Technology Research with Paper title “Optimum Design of Photovoltaic Powered Sea Water Desalination System”, on 15th December 2014.