The fast growth in the demand of freshwater due to the scarcity of natural water and increase in the world population puts more stress on the desalination sectors, which requires the installation of high-efficient thermal desalination plants. Among these desalination plants, multi effect desalination (MED) and RO processes are considered as the most reliable techniques of producing freshwater from saline water. Recently, the MED and RO process have been introduced in hybrid systems. However, this includes the development of simple superstructures of the hybrid system in spite of the improvement made beyond the individual process. To overcome this challenge, this dissertation comes to fill this gap and investigates appropriate methods of optimising the operational parameters of the hybrid system. In this regard, several innovative ideas are demonstrated for the first time to enhance the MED process, which are specifically include the improvement of key performance indicators including water production cost via a repetitive simulation based model. In line of this, the investigation of the lowest water production cost for different numbers of effects of MED system is carried out via optimisation based model.
To deploy a sustainable source of energy, this research illustrates the combined system of MED-TVC and wind turbine with attaining a considerable reduction of specific energy consumption. Also, this research presents two novel designs of hybrid system of MED and single and double RO processes of different configurations that contain permeate reprocessing design and retentate reprocessing design of RO process. These layouts demonstrate a considerable reduction of total energy consumption within an accepted product salinity compared to the ones presented in the open literature.
To apply the energy-water concept for a smart city, this research emphasises on the design moderation and process optimisation of the MED-TVC and double RO processes to generate different grades of water. Moreover, the structure of this dissertation introduces a revision of the steady state MED and RO modelling. This in turn provides an efficient hybrid system for seawater desalination by refining the reliability and efficiency of the associated process. The results stated the following findings; It can be stated that 17 effects of MED-TVC system is suitable to achieve the lowest fresh water production cost of 0.614 $/m3. However, the implication of particle swarm optimisation method has further introduced the freshwater production cost from 0.614 $/m3 to 0.432 $/m3 by investigating the optimal operating conditions for the 17 effects. Also, this research introduces that Dhahran is more potential compared to Jeddah in the KSA to construct an integration system of MED-TVC and a renewable energy source of wind turbine that presents the lowest specific energy consumption.
This research also shows that the new proposed design of MED-TVC and single permeate reprocessing RO processes has a lower energy consumption of around 2.2% if compared to other configurations suggested in the open literature. Further reduction of this energy consumption has been conducted after optimising the inlet conditions of the hybrid system of MED-TVC and permeate reprocessing RO processes. The novel design of double RO and MED-TVC introduces an improvement of water productivity of 9%, corresponding to a reduction of brine flowrate within 5% compared to the base case of permeate reprocessing RO (PRRO) and MED-TVC. Finally, this research presents the improvement of different scenarios of MED-TVC and double RO processes to quantify the production of different types of water with fulfilling the environmental concepts.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/19749 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | Abubaker, Omer M.A. |
| Contributors | Mujtaba, Iqbal M., Patel, Rajnikant, John, Yakubu M., Al-Obaidi, Mudhar A.A.R. |
| Publisher | University of Bradford, Faculty of Engineering, and Informatics |
| Source Sets | Bradford Scholars |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis, doctoral, PhD |
| Rights | <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-nd/3.0/88x31.png" /></a><br />The University of Bradford theses are licenced under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/">Creative Commons Licence</a>. |
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