AN INVESTIGATION INTO ECONOMIC DESALINATION USING

Desalination has now been practiced on a large scale for more than 50 years. A desalination system driven by a hybrid power supply system (HYB) consisting of renewable energy source (RES) is described. The system is considered to be an attractive solution to provide water and electricity in certain arid areas, where water scarcity is severe and without grid of electricity. Reverse osmosis (RO) desalination process was chosen since is a fairly mature technology. Further improvements are likely to be incremental in nature, unless design improvements allow major savings in capital costs for different capacities. A unit of RO was studied with different power supply sources for both seawater and brackish water. The HYB power source showed to be the most promising configuration for desalination using renewable energy technologies. It showed to be the most competitive from the cost point of view and the superiority from the point of view of environmental pollution. In this study a HYB-RO computer program has been developed on the above basis to choose the proper size and to calculate the cost per unit. It showed to be very effective in designing such versatile system. It can be used for the design of hybrid power supply system to drive a reverse osmosis unit for the desalination of brackish water and seawater. It is used to assist the designer to develop an optimal configuration for the hybrid power supply system as well as the optimal water production. Cost analysis was investigated and it was concluded that the developed technique brings a moderate cost compared with the traditional desalination methods