International Journal of Environmental Science and Development

Abstract—In this paper, a new modeling technique of a seawater reverse osmosis (RO) desalination plant fed by hybrid renewable energy sources is provided. The proposed model consists of five sub-systems including RO plant model, photovoltaic (PV) model, horizontal wind turbine (HWT) model, battery model and the control room unit. In the RO model, the process is optimized to have the lowest specific energy consumption under different operating conditions and variable productivity ranging from 100 to 10000 m3 per day. However, in the PV and HWT models, various manufacturing datasheets for PV panels and wind turbines are stored at different power ratings. The model allows the selection of appropriate design specifications based on average solar radiation and average wind speed at the site. In addition, the total battery storage, Ampere-hour capacity and other specifications are calculated in the battery model. The control room unit is responsible for calculating the total annual costs and the cost of fresh water production according to the plant productivity, lifetime and interest rate. It has a splitter control ratio to regulate the load distribution between PV and wind turbines relative to changes in climatic conditions. The model is simulated using Matlab/Simulink and provides good results for model validation.

Index Terms—Optimization, photovoltaic, reverse osmosis desalination, system modeling, wind turbine.

Ahmed A. Hossam-Eldin, Karim H. Youssef, and Hossam Kotb are with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Alexandria University, Alexandria, Egypt (e-mail: a.hossamudn@alexu.edu.eg, khmyoussef@yahoo.com, hossam.kotb@alexu.edu.eg).
Kamal A. Abed is with the Department of Mechanical Engineering, National Research Centre, Cairo, Egypt (e-mail: kaabed3@hotmail.com).

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Cite: Ahmed A. Hossam-Eldin, Kamal A. Abed, Karim H. Youssef, and Hossam Kotb, "Techno-Economic Optimization and New Modeling Technique of PV-Wind-Reverse Osmosis Desalination Plant at Variable Load Conditions," International Journal of Environmental Science and Development vol. 10, no. 8, pp. 223-230, 2019.

Copyright © 2019 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).