Sustainable Desalination with a Combination of a Windmill and Reverse Osmosis
In coastal areas with a shortage of fresh drinking water, but enough wind, the combination of wind energy and reverse osmosis (RO) may provide a sustainable way to produce drinking water. Especially in remote areas the combination is also cost effective. At the moment there are already systems in operation that use windmills in combination with RO installations. Most of them store electrical energy in batteries and operate the RO when the battery is charged. Batteries are expensive and they have a limited life time (about two years). An alternative option is to operate the RO directly driven by wind energy. The RO is operated with a variable flux, depending on the amount of energy available from the windmill. With a variable water production the water is stored rather than the energy. Storing water is inexpensive compared to storing energy. In this paper three different wind driven RO membrane options are discussed: two for seawater desalination and one for brackish water desalination. The two seawater options were built as pilot installations and tested. One pilot was operated continuously during one month. No specific problems (leakages, fouling) were observed as a result of the frequent change in operational conditions (every minute). The brackish water installation was only designed and calculated. Very important in a concept with a variable flux is the decreasing permeate quality at lower fluxes. The avarage permeate quality should have a IDS below 500 mg/1. It appeared that the costs for desalinating sea water in the pilots were about 3 euro per m3. The costs for desalinating brackish water were below 1 euro per m3.
S.G.J. Heijman B.A.Ibbotson J.Q.J.C. Verberk J.C. van Dijk
Delft University of Technology, Section of Sanitary Engineering, Faculty of Civil Engineering and Ge University of South Australia, Division of Information Technology, Engineering and the Environment,S
国际会议
2010 Asia-Pacific Conference on Desalination and Water Reclamation(2010 亚太脱盐大会)
青岛
英文
82-92
2010-06-22（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）