Various approaches to thermodynamic optimization of a hybrid multi-effect evaporation with thermal vapour compression and reverse osmosis desalination system integrated to a gas turbine power plant

Abstract

This paper investigates the simulation of a hybrid desalination system composed of multi-effect evaporation with thermal vapour compression desalination (METVC) and reverse osmosis (RO) plant. The hybrid desalination system is also integrated with a gas turbine power plant through a heat recovery steam generator (HRSG). First, a comprehensive Thermodynamic model for HRSG, METVC, and RO are developed for predicting thermal behaviour of hybrid desalination system. Depending on the interconnection between input and output streams of METVC and RO, six configurations are proposed, and their results are compared in two different scenarios. In the first scenario, METVC desalination production is fixed at its maximum capacity of 70000 m3/day. The heat potential of power plants is fully extracted at maximum capacity of production of METVC. In the second scenario, METVC desalination production is not fixed. The limitation on the total production of the desalination plant (METVC+RO) is imposed as a constraint to the optimization problem. The results show that, regardless of the scenario under consideration, cconfiguration 1(the outlet water of the cooling system in METVC has been used for the feed water of the RO system) has the minimum energy consumption as well as maximum exergy efficiency.