Solar-powered Rankine cycles for fresh water production

Abstract The lack of access to electricity grid and fresh water strongly limits the development and the quality of life to many rural locations. The distributed solar power generation can be applied to many basic needs, not only electricity generation, but also desalination, cooling, heating, etc. For this reason it provides opportunity of social and economic development and therefore promoting employment. This paper is focused on the analysis of distributed solarpowered generation systems for driving a reverse osmosis desalination process based on solar-heated Rankine cycles. Three different top temperature ranges are considered in order to consider medium to low temperature solar thermal collectors. Results presented in this paper points out that desalination systems coupled to solar-powered organic Rankine cycles exhibit lower specific consumption of solar energy than solar distillation and solar photovoltaic reverse osmosis systems. Therefore, there are interesting prospects for developing cost-effective solar desalination systems based on such a technology although intensive experimental research is still needed.

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