Journal
ENERGY
Volume 36, Issue 11, Pages 6617-6626Publisher
PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2011.08.056
Keywords
Exergy analysis; Seawater; Reverse osmosis; Pressure retarded osmosis; Desalination; Energy recovery device
Categories
Funding
- King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia
- Center for Clean Water and Clean Energy at MIT
- KFUPM
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A second law analysis of a reverse osmosis desalination plant is carried out using reliable seawater exergy formulation instead of a common model in literature that represents seawater as an ideal mixture of liquid water and solid sodium chloride. The analysis is performed using reverse osmosis desalination plant data and compared with results previously published using the ideal mixture model. It is demonstrated that the previous model has serious shortcomings, particularly with regard to calculation of the seawater flow exergy, the minimum work of separation, and the second law efficiency. The most up-to-date thermodynamic properties of seawater, as needed to conduct an exergy analysis, are given as correlations in this paper. From this new analysis, it is found that the studied reverse osmosis desalination plant has very low second law efficiency (<2%) even when using the available energy recovery systems. Therefore, an energy recovery system is proposed using the (PRO) pressure retarded osmotic method. The proposed alternative design has a second law efficiency of 20%, and the input power is reduced by 38% relative to original reverse osmosis system. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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