Recent Advancements in Solar Hybrid Desalination Measurements and Controls

Abstract

Crisis for fresh drinking water is a major concern now-a-day. There are many regions with favorable features throughout the world, but whose development is principally limited by the lack of fresh water. In arid areas of the Middle East and North Africa, where large-scale development has already occurred, the desalination plants are employed to extract fresh water, requires very large energy consumption. This motivates the development of desalination systems that are powered by solar energy. In this article, solar desalination technologies are reviewed with the goal of identifying key technical challenges and potential opportunities for solar desalination. Existing solar-powered desalination plants have generally been indirect solar-desalination systems that first transform solar energy into electrical energy and then employ the resulting electrical energy to drive desalination systems. Other, potentially more efficient direct solar-desalination systems directly convert the solar energy to pressure and/or heat and use these to directly power the desalination process. The cost-effectiveness, energy-efficiency, and other relevant quantities of the potential technologies for solar-desalination systems are described in this study. To maximize the utilization of solar energy, a battery bank should be integrated with solar cell in the unit.