Simulation and optimization of multi effect desalination coupled to a gas turbine plant with HRSG consideration

There are a large number of gas turbine power plants in the south of Iran that could be exploited to produce fresh water and overcome water shortage. In order to combine gas turbine power plant and thermal desalination, heat recovery steam generator (HRSG) is required for producing steam. Few papers in literature have investigated this combination and none of them has considered HRSG in their studies. Thus, in this paper, multi-effect evaporation thermal vapor compression desalination (ME-TVC) is coupled to gas turbine plant through HRSG. After performing a thorough thermoecnomic analysis, an optimization study is done in view of three approaches. The first and second approaches are single objective optimizations, which utilize two heuristic algorithms, namely, genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO). The first approach is a global optimization problem, which completely optimize the combined system. The second one, as an innovative method, is a local optimization approach, which optimize HRSG and ME-TVC in two separate stages while the third approach is a multi objective optimization. Eventually, the results of the first and second approaches show that the minimum amount of objective function achieved by PSO is better, although the third approach presents a system with higher productivity. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.