SOLAR DESALINATION PLANT

 

 

SOLAR DESALINATION PLANT

Sanjay Prasad, PG Student

Department of Renewable Energy


 

1.    Introduction:  Desalination means the process that removes excess salt and other minerals from water in order to obtain fresh water suitable for human consumption and irrigation. Sometimes the process produces table salt as a byproduct.

 

2.    Need of Renewable energy for Desalination: The origin and continuation of humanity based on water. Water is one of the most abundant resources on the earth, covering three-fourths of the planet’s surface. However, 97% of the earth's water is the salt water in the oceans and 3% is fresh water. Population growth is one factor, not only the need for drinking water and sanitation but also the need to produce food. As climate change makes rainfall less predictable and drought more common, a growing number of countries are turning to desalination. The separation of salts from seawater requires a large amount of energy which, when produced from fossil fuel, can cause harm to the environment. Therefore, there is a need to employ environment friendly energy sources in order to desalinate seawater. It’s also a fact that production of fresh water requires large amount of energy : 

 

3.    Desalination Technologies: The two major types of technologies that are used around the world for desalination can be classified as thermal or membrane. Both technologies need energy to operate and produce fresh water. There are different ways to produce fresh water with desalination technologies.

⮚     Reverse Osmosis

⮚     Multi-stage Flash process

⮚     Multi Effect Distillation

 

4.    Solar Technologies: It comes as an evidence to use solar power for running of the plants. Solar technologies can produce heat and electricity through the turbine (CSP) or directly electricity (PV or CPV). Growing interest and development on CSP as well as PV tend to make these technologies more and more attractive.

 

5.    Photovoltaic/ Reverse Osmosis: Many demonstration plants carried out coupling RO systems with solar PV electricity. Most common way to convert DC from a PV panel through an inverter to produce AC is immediately used in a pump. PV-RO system capacity ranging from 0.5 to 50 m3 / day.

 

6.    Multi Stage Flash: The MSF process is a thermal process that can also use solar power with parabolic troughs. A thermal storage system can be added to the system to smooth variation of thermal energy supply and allow continuous production of fresh water. The average range of solar powered MSF is 10-60 l/m2.day.

 

7.  Multi Effect Distillation: we can find more installations of MED worldwide, coupled with solar energy from different technologies. The capacity of large plants (5000 m3/ day)

Conclusion: Solar MED and MSF, though appearing to be natural and tempting solutions, cannot be taken as proven technologies. More and more developments in both solar power and desalination technologies are expected to keep these solutions competitive compared to RO systems coupled with conventional power plants. We can note that the range of possibilities is widely open in desalination. Need for fresh water will always be present, therefore desalination technologies must be enhanced to become cleaner, more efficient and more virtuous.

 

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