Author(s)

Jacob R. Pleis, Dongmei Zhou

Department of Mechanical Engineering, California State University, Sacramento, CA, USA.

The demand for more efficient power generation is not only a prominent subject for environmental reasons but for economic reasons as well. Continuing growth in population contributes to more and more consumption of fresh water, demanding less expensive desalination production, especially in the regions with little or no natural fresh water. Multigeneration desalination power plants may provide solutions to these issues through advanced and efficient designs that are capable of supplying fresh water and power to remote or arid regions of the world. This paper examines the flexibility and versatility of multigeneration systems to showcase the myriad of combinations that are available to accommodate any specific application. It also proposes a specific design for a multi-stage flash desalination system that is powered directly by the exhaust gases of a natural gas micro-turbine capable of producing around 1 MW of electrical power. The performance characteristics, the fresh water produced per kW and the overall plant efficiency, are numerically investigated and compared with previous designs that were analyzed on a larger scale. It is determined that the multigeneration system can produce 56,891 gallons of fresh water per day and an estimated 4.07 tons of salt per day and that a small scale multi-generation desalting systems is feasible.

Multigeneration, Trigeneration, Cogeneration, Multi-Stage-Flash Desalination, Power Plant, Waste Heat Recovery, Numerical Analysis

Pleis, J. and Zhou, D. (2017) Numerical and Experimental Study of a Multi-Generation Desalination Power Plant. Journal of Power and Energy Engineering, 5, 172-192. doi: 10.4236/jpee.2017.59014.