On-Off Control Strategy in a BWRO System under Variable Power and Feedwater Concentration Conditions
Open Access
- 9 July 2020
- journal article
- research article
- Published by MDPI AG in Applied Sciences
- Vol. 10 (14), 4748
- https://doi.org/10.3390/app10144748
Abstract
Although reverse osmosis (RO) is the technology of choice for solving water shortage problems, it is a process that consumes large amounts of energy. Brackish water (BW) desalination is more efficient than seawater desalination due to the lower salinity of the feedwater source. This makes coupling renewable energy sources with BWRO systems attractive. The operation of this type of systems is complex and requires the design of control strategies to obtain optimal operation. The novelty of this work was to propose a simple on-off control strategy for operating a BWRO system that can work with one and two stages and with different configurations considering six spiral wound membrane elements per pressure vessel (PV). The feedwater quality variations of a real groundwater well were used together with a computational tool to simulate the response of the different configurations with the purpose of selecting the most appropriate depending on the input power to the BWRO system. The most suitable configurations were found to be 1:0, 2:1 and 3:2 (PV first stage:PV second stage). It was additionally found that increased feedwater concentrations resulted in shorter operating ranges to maximize permeate water production for the 1:0 and 2:1 configurations, and that the 3:2 configuration was the most suitable for most of the operating range.This publication has 56 references indexed in Scilit:
- Large-scale time evaluation for energy estimation of stand-alone hybrid photovoltaic–wind system feeding a reverse osmosis desalination unitEnergy, 2011
- Weakly s-supplementally embedded minimal subgroups of finite groupsProceedings of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society, 2011
- Renewable energy powered membrane technology: The effect of wind speed fluctuations on the performance of a wind-powered membrane system for brackish water desalinationJournal of Membrane Science, 2011
- Optimization of solar-powered reverse osmosis desalination pilot plant using response surface methodologyDesalination, 2010
- Nonlinear Model-Based Control of an Experimental Reverse-Osmosis Water Desalination SystemIndustrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, 2009
- Model predictive control of a reverse osmosis desalination unitDesalination, 2006
- Coupling of PV-powered RO brackish water desalination plant with solar stillsDesalination, 1998
- Model based control for reverse osmosis desalination processesDesalination, 1996
- The solution-diffusion model: a reviewJournal of Membrane Science, 1995
- System identification and control of reverse osmosis desalinationDesalination, 1989