Abstract

AZANZA LUTSAK, Eduardo Vladimir  and  REMACHE, Álvaro Miguel,. Reverse osmosis and distillation: a comparative analysis of integration in power plants. RCTU [online]. 2022, vol.9, n.2, pp.1-18. ISSN 1390-7697.  https://doi.org/10.26423/rctu.v9i2.700.

The increasing scarcity of water, the world’s overpopulation, and the rising electricity demand have given rise to the need for energy processes to be more efficient. Therefore, this paper presents a comparative analysis of two seawater desalination technologies that provide water but consume large amounts of energy. On the one hand, the article’s goal is to conduct an energy comparison of the two technologies that have the highest global contracting capacity-distillation and reverse osmosis. On the other hand, the paper is aimed at integrating these two technologies into a power block and finding out which technology is preferable in terms of its impact on the overall performance of the power cycle. The study evaluates the energy consumption of both distillation and reverses osmosis (RO), taking the feed water as a design parameter. It is known that for distillation technology, the process is insensitive to salinity; therefore, it does not matter what kind of feed water to use. In contrast, reverse osmosis factors such as temperature and salinity always cause an increase in energy consumption. Furthermore, conventional (operating temperature < 70°C) and unconventional (operating temperature > 70°C) distillation technologies have been evaluated to compete with conventional reverse osmosis (one-step, one-stage) technology with an energy recovery device from the brine. As a result, it has been concluded that, although the thermal efficiency of the distillation process has increased, this technology cannot compete with reverse osmosis, even when it includes a thermal compressor.

Keywords : Desalination; Energy consumption; Energy efficiency; Steam engines; Thermal engineering.

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