Thermoeconomic analysis of a seawater reverse osmosis plant

Thermoeconomy is a useful and powerful tool that combines thermodynamics and economics. It can evaluate how irreversibility and costs of any process affect the exergoeconomic cost of the product flows. The thermoeconomic analysis of a seawater reverse osmosis desalination plant with a 21,000 m 3 /d nominal capacity located in Tenerife (Canary Islands, Spain) is given. This analysis extends the exergy analysis performed in a previous paper where further details about features of desalination facility, flow diagram, equipment purposes and flows of the process are widely provided. The main result indicates that economics predominates over the thermodynamics aspect; thus the influence of the operational parameters on the unit cost of the final product is significantly limited. Reverse osmosis skid is the most influential equipment on both the thermodynamic and economic aspects. As well, pretreatment has a large influence on the unit cost of the final product, essentially due to OM conversely, membrane replacement is the least important among the parameters analysed.