Performance and feasibility of using an integrated solar powered desalination system in United Arab Emirates

This paper addressees the technical and economic feasibility of using an integrated solar powered desalination system under the United Arab Emirates (UAE) weather conditions. The proposed system consists of the parabolic trough concentrator (PTC) as an evaporation unit and shell and tube heat exchanger as condensation unit. In this paper, the thermal model was derived for the PTC to predict the steam productivity. Also the heat exchanger was designed using HTRI Xchanger software. The performance of the system was simulated for typical summer and winter days in June and January, respectively. The daily fresh water productivity was estimated in June to be 214.5 kg/day and was 140.0 kg/day in January. A preheating effect was implemented to increase the fresh water productivity, due to which the fresh water productivity increased by 7.14% and 8.50% for the selected days in June and January respectively. Furthermore, a flushing mechanism was designed and implemented on the system to eliminate the salt accumulation in the absorber tube which proved to be efficient in maintaining the optimum productivity of the system. Finally, the feasibility study was conducted which showed that the payback period of the proposed system is about 6 years based on PTC area of 60m2.