article · Sustainable Environment Research
This research investigates a reverse osmosis water treatment unit combined with a Pelton wheel turbine to supply emergency electrical loads while producing potable water. The Pelton wheel serves as a low-cost alternative to conventional pressure exchangers for energy recovery. System performance was evaluated across operating pressures between 650 and 850 kPa, feed water salinities from 400 to 850 ppm, and temperatures from 20 to 39 degrees Celsius. Increasing the pressure boosted the permeate flow rate by approximately 72 percent, from 2.5 to 4.3 litres per minute, while reducing power generation from 960 to 270 watts. Higher operating temperatures improved both water flux and purity, reducing permeate dissolved solids to 56 ppm at 39 degrees Celsius. An open-source Arduino controller regulated pump pressure to balance water output and emergency power requirements, aligning with a theoretical model that showed an average deviation of 3.5 percent.
Water scarcity and energy demands are closely linked challenges. Utilising a low-cost Pelton wheel to recover energy from desalination reject streams offers an affordable way to generate emergency electricity. Demonstrating that automated pump control can balance clean water production with power generation helps design more resilient, dual-purpose water purification facilities capable of supporting critical electrical needs during power disruptions.
This design is targeted at small-scale desalination operators needing affordable energy recovery and backup electricity for emergency loads. By demonstrating a functional experimental system managed by an Arduino controller, the technology represents applied and tested research at a prototype stage. Real-world adoption would depend on validating long-term mechanical durability and adapting the control system to fluctuating industrial feed water conditions before commercial deployment.
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Abstract Nowadays, the whole world is moving very quickly into the field of seawater desalination. This is because the world suffers from a lack of potable water. Water and energy are adjoining linked fields. The present work aims at investigating the performance of a reverse osmosis (RO) plant integrated with Pelton Wheel under various operating conditions. The main reason for using Pelton turbine instead of the pressure exchanger (PX) is the low cost of Pelton compared to that of PX. The RO system integrated with the Pelton Wheel was tested under various operating pressures of 650, 700, 750, 800, and 850 kPa. Changing the feed water pressure affects the pressure of the reject entering the Pelton wheel and this, in turn, affects the velocity of the water jet. Also, the impact of varying the feed water salinity (total dissolved solids (TDS) = 400, 500, 600, 700, and 850 ppm) and temperature (20–39 °C) on the permeate and reject of RO was tested. In addition, a theoretical modeling was built to predict the performance of the RO system. The permeate flow rate was increased by raising the RO operating pressures. The permeate flow rate was augmented from 2.5 to 4.3 L min −1 when increasing the operating pressure from 650 to 850 kPa, respectively. Therefore, the permeate flow rate is enhanced by around 72% when increasing the operating pressure by only 30%. Besides, increasing the pressure by 30% (from 650 to 860 kPa) decreased the generated power of the Pelton Wheel by approximately 72% (from 960 to 270 W, respectively). Also, increasing the feed water salinity leads to raise the salinity of RO permeate, and vice versa. The RO permeate salinity is raised from 165 to 285 ppm when increasing the operating pressure from 650 to 850 kPa, respectively. As well, the more the increase in feed water temperature, the more improve in the permeate flux and salinity. The permeate TDS was decreased from 140 ppm at feed-water temperature 20 °C to 56 ppm at feed water temperature 39 °C. In this study, the Arduino program circuit was used to supply the required emergency loads by controlling the pressure values of high-pressure pump due to easy and open code program. Finally, the theoretical modelling results are in good correspondence with the experimental results. The average deviation among the theoretical and experimental results was 3.5%.
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DOI: 10.1186/s42834-023-00183-w
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