Designing of Reverse Osmosis Desalination Plant in Jordan Valley Using Optimal Energy Options With Less Environmental Impacts
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Date
2017-08-03
Authors
عثمان, أحمد عبد الله عبد الفتاح
Journal Title
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Publisher
An-Najah National University
Abstract
The objective of this research is to design a reverse osmosis desalination plant in Jordan Valley using clean and sustainable energy source. The village of Az-Zubaidat’s well water is taken as a case study. According to World Health Organization (WHO) Az-Zubaidat’s well water is not potable and need to be purified. The total dissolved solids(TDS) of Az-Zubaidat’s well water is 2100 ppm, which is high and should be less than or equal to 1500 ppm. The population of Az-Zubaidat’s Village in 2016 is 1798 capita based on engineering method for forecasting the population and the corresponding water average consumption rate is 150 L/capita/day according to WHO standards.
A reverse osmosis (RO) plant with an average daily drinking water production of 270m3/day is designed; the capacity of Az-Zubaidat’s well is 120m3/hr.
The reverse osmosis technology is considered in this research where feasible and sustainable energy source to power the plant is to be studied and analyzed. Powering the plant using diesel generators is not considered in this study as the running cost is high and exhausts of the generators is highly polluting. In the meanwhile, connecting to Israeli electrical grid is not considered as an option in this study as it increases the dependency on Israeli side and the capacity offered is limited.
Investigating the possibility of utilizing renewable energy sources, mainly the solar energy to operate the designed plant is the core of this research. The solar energy includes Photovoltaic and wind energy. Az-Zubaidat’s village has great potential of solar radiation which reaches about 5.40 kWh/m2/day (global horizontal) but the annual average speed is very low and definitely not suitable for electricity generation. Stand-alone hybrid system (off grid) based on PV panels, diesel generator and different storage systems with five configurations are investigated. The five configurations include PV panels with batteries, diesel generator(DG) with batteries, PV panels and DG without batteries, PV panels and DG with batteries and DG without batteries. To investigate the optimal option of the previous configuration is tedious and time-consuming effort and impossible in some cases, so Hybrid Optimization of Multiple Electric Renewable (HOMER) software is utilized. HOMER software facilities the sensitivity analysis and make it easier to evaluate the many possible system configurations and choose the best one.
The results shows that the configuration consists of PV, DG and battery storage system from the Lead acid batteries is the best as the cost of energy (COE) is 0.462$/kWh and the cost of potable cubic meter is 0.601$/ m3. Using water distribution tank as a storage system to reduce or exclude the battery energy storage system is analyzed in this research. The results shows that introducing storage tank to the configuration that includes PV, DG and battery reduces the COE to 0.348$/kWh and the cost of potable cubic meter is 0.479$/ m3.