Water desalination and power cogeneration utilizing heat pipe heat exchanger
| Autor: | J Searle, Abhijit Date, Jack Nihill, Aliakbar Akbarzadeh, Jason Velardo |
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| Rok vydání: | 2021 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering. 1139:012015 |
| ISSN: | 1757-899X 1757-8981 |
| Popis: | Energy production in Australia is predominantly achieved with non-renewable sources such as coal and natural gas, with up to 86% of national energy being produced by these processes. Further, access to fresh water is fast becoming an issue in the harsh Australian climate. This paper proposes a novel design capable of producing electrical energy and desalinating water using only waste heat from industrial processes. A finned heat pipe heat exchanger plays an integral role in this process, extracting heat from a low-medium temperature waste heat stream and passing it through a thermoelectric generator and evaporative water desalination unit. Preliminary experimentation on this system showed that different desalination loop configurations played a large role in the desalination ability of the system, however had negligible effect on the thermal to electrical conversion efficiency of the system. When a closed loop system was used, the recovery ratio of the desalination unit reached 4% at the highest waste heat temperature. In the open loop configuration, the recovery ratio was below 1% for all tested inputs. The thermal to electrical conversion efficiency of this system was also measured and a value of about 1.2% was determined for most cases. Thus the ability of this novel system to both produce useful electrical energy and desalinate water was proven. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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