Author(s)

Moustafa Elshafei, Anwar Khalil Sheikh, Naseer Ahmad

Department of Mechanical Engineering, KFUPM, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.
Systems Engineering Department, KFUPM, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

In this work the performance evaluation of directly driven Reverse Osmosis (RO) water desalination system by Photovoltaic (PV) arrays is investigated by a novice method. Reverse Osmosis water desalination system needs continuous supply of energy and on the other hand energy from the PV is intermittent in nature. The energy consumption of RO plant is strong function of clean water (permeate) flow rate and system pressure and they needs to be tuned to match the maximum power provided by the PV arrays. In this work a novice method to tune the RO system parameters by manipulating the position of the valve at the brine side of the RO system is proposed. A simple perturb and observe algorithm is used for automatic control of the valve position. The performance of the proposed battery less system is compared with a conventional system using PV, charge controller and battery. The proposed directly driven battery-less system provides more water per day than battery operated system.

PVRO System; Maximum Power Point Tracking; Reverse Osmosis; Desalination, Renewable Energy

M. Elshafei, A. Sheikh and N. Ahmad, "Directly Driven RO System by PV Solar Panel Arrays," Open Journal of Applied Sciences, Vol. 3 No. 2B, 2013, pp. 35-40. doi: 10.4236/ojapps.2013.32B007.