Investigation of hybrid solar-driven desalination system employing reverse osmosis process

The water resources are depleting rapidly due to the increasing population of the world. Thus, it has become a big challenge to provide sustainable quality water for future generations. Unfortunately, due to decreasing rivers/canals water supply, the trend of groundwater pumping has increased for agricultural purposes during the last few decades especially in developing countries of Africa and Asia like Pakistan. The freshwater-scarce areas in the world are now relying on water desalination processes. In the recent era, the desalination has emerged as a potential method to produce freshwater. Although the process of desalination is an acceptable way to convert saline to freshwater, this is a highly electrical energy-intensive process. At the same time, the availability of enormous daily solar energy in many parts of the world provides an excellent opportunity to operate reverse osmosis (RO) systems. The hybrid solar system seems to be a feasible solution for continuous water desalination throughout the day. Thus, this study was carried out for the development and experimental investigation of a 500 L h(-1) decentralized photovoltaic (PV-RO) system. Based on the running load of the RO system, a 2 kW(p) PV system was coupled with RO plant through 5 kVA hybrid inverter. The experiments were conducted in terms of no tracking and three-point manual PV tracking, cooling, and no-cooling of the PV system. The results showed 18% higher daily PV energy using PV tracking and 10% higher PV energy by cooling of PV panels. The sizing and development process of this system is helpful for easier selection and installation of a decentralized hybrid PV-RO system to perform environmental friendly desalination of water by the community to meet the future challenges of water scarcity.