A Carbon-Neutral Highly Productive Solar-Powered Desalination Process: Improving Economic Performance with Carbon Pricing

This work proposes a carbon-neutral desalination process. For this, at first a rigorous theoretical framework for multieffect desalination coupled with a thermal vapor compressor (MED-TVC) is developed to validate with the data set of a plant operated in Libya and to show the outperformance over an existing model. A mechanical vapor compressor (MVC) is proposed to integrate with MED, and the hot brine and distillate withdrawn from that MED are employed for feed preheating. A multiobjective genetic algorithm -based optimizer is formulated with three conflicting objectives, namely, productivity, CO2 emission, and production cost that includes carbon tax. The proposed MED-MVC outperforms MED-TVC in terms of all of those performance metrics. Subsequently, we move to transform this MED-MVC process to a carbon-neutral unit by introducing solar energy to generate makeup steam and electricity. This innovative sustainable zero-emission desalination process secures higher productivity at a lower cost than the existing MED-TVC plant scenario.