TITLE:
Reverse-Osmosis Desalination of Water Powered by Photo-Voltaic Modules
AUTHORS:
Ammar Alkhatib
KEYWORDS:
Photo-Voltaic; Desalination; Reverse Osmosis
JOURNAL NAME:
Computational Water, Energy, and Environmental Engineering,
Vol.3 No.1,
December
17,
2013
ABSTRACT: The rising of the world’s
population leads automatically to the rising of water demand. As a consequence
the lack of drinking water increases. Currently, approximately 1.2 billion
people globally (one-sixth of the world’s population) do not have access to adequate clean
water. Since a large part of the world’s population is concentrated in coastal areas, the desalination
of seawater seems to be a promising solution, especially in our Arab world. An
innovative stand-alone solar desalination system could be used to produce
drinking water from seawater or any brackish water sources. The great advantage of such a system
is that it combines efficient desalination technology, reverse osmosis, with a
renewable energy source; the main goal is improving the technical feasibility of such systems. There are many advantages of this
coupling with RE resources; first of all we separate the drinking water from
the electricity grid and its faults, save the burning fossil fuel and its
emissions and can provide fresh water to remote communities that do not have sufficient
traditional energy sources; but as we see in the thesis we don’t have economic
benefit; because these projects depend on the electricity cost in each country
and its location and its solar specifications. We design and
implement a small laboratorial model for PV-RO (Photo-Voltaic Powered Reverse
Osmosis) to recognize the its performance for seawater and brackish water; many of the problems are interrupted such as embargo on Syria; so we
see this project has to be done according to affordable local potentialities,
but we crave to keep the principle of operation, so we make it for the tap
water which close to brackish.