A daily freshwater production of 50 m~3/ton of silica gel using an adsorption-ejector combination powered by low-grade heat

摘要

Adsorption desalination system (ADS) is being considered to mitigate the gap between water demand and availability. This research work proposes a new integration between ADS and a liquid-vapor ejector to increase the freshwater productivity by many folds. Two different schemes are proposed. The first scheme is adopted for cooling applications (ACEJ), while the second one is mainly used for desalination applications (ADEJ). Besides, internal heat recovery is applied between the condenser and evaporator in the ADEJ cycle for further enhancement in the overall system performance. A numerical model is built to investigate the effectiveness of the two proposed configurations at various operating conditions. The present results are compared with those of the standalone adsorption cooling system (ACS) and ADS. ADEJ with heat recovery produce a specific daily freshwater of 52.67 m(3)/ton of silica gel using 95 degrees C desorption temperature. This value is higher than the one produced by the ADS by a factor of 5.0. Integrating an ejector to silica gel/water ADS achieves a COP of 1.47, which is higher than that of ADS by a factor of 2.7. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.