Photovoltaic Reverse Osmosis – Feasibility and a Pathway to Develop Technology

Small-scale photovoltaic-powered reverse osmosis (PVRO) desalination plants can provide fresh water to remote communities that do not have sufficient natural sources. The technical feasibility of such systems is well-established and the economics for specific locations have been addressed. Recently, generalized methods to evaluate their economic feasibility have been proposed. They show that the economic feasibility is a strong function of location. Also, increasing the efficiency of PVRO systems can extend their feasibility to currently marginal or unfeasible locations. Here, this feasibility evaluation methodology is briefly reviewed. Then, a concept for enhancing PVRO system feasibility based on smart control is presented. Finally, a program to establish experimentally validated models required for these control algorithms is described, including the experimental system for model verification and for algorithm testing. Early experimental results are presented that show good agreement with those of the analytical models.