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Solar desalination system design for irrigation/drinking water and electricity generation in desert or arid areas

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posted on 2020-04-01, 07:52 authored by Jose Izquierdo, Richard BlanchardRichard Blanchard
Climate change and population growth are likely to be future challenges to obtaining water and growing crops in arid areas. Traditional hand pumps are available but give relatively low flows; they are time consuming and are limited by the depth of wells. In low latitudes, solar energy can be the main renewable energy source for water pumping and desalination. In this project, several ways to get irrigation water, drinking water and electricity have been evaluated in the country of Western Sahara. Solar pumps have been proven to be a reliable economic solution for irrigation, but drinkable water is also required in arid areas where the salinity of water wells can be high. There is an obvious synergy when using photovoltaic solar panels for pumping, desalination, and electricity generation, but the feasibility of a project involving all those uses depends on demand and finance. This paper uses resource, technology, and economic assessments to model scenarios that demonstrate the viability of this triple approach. A Net Present Value of €26,887, and an Internal Rate of Return of 10.41% was found where 7 m3 of water was pumped per day.

History

School

  • Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering

Published in

Journal of Sustainability Research

Volume

2

Issue

2

Publisher

Hapres

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Authors

Publisher statement

This is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Acceptance date

2020-03-27

Publication date

2020-03-30

Copyright date

2020

ISSN

2632-6582

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Richard Blanchard. Deposit date: 31 March 2020

Article number

e200018

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