The Numerical Simulation and Performance Analysis of Seawater Desalination Unit: The Case of SWRO Station with Energy Recovery Devices (ERDs)

The demand for good quality drinking water is experiencing strong growth on a global scale, particularly in emerging countries, such as the BASIC countries (Brazil, South Africa, India, and China). For this reason, sea or brackish water desalination technology using membrane filtration technique is a very effective and sustainable method for dealing with this problem. In this work, the performance study of the reverse osmosis desalination plant of Nouadhibou-Mauritania coupled or not to an energy recovery unit was carried out using the Matlab/Simulink software. The objective of this work is to study the functional and productive performance of the reverse osmosis unit by examining the importance of the pressure exchanger in such systems, by acting on the mixing rate of feed water with the flow of water delivered by the pressure exchanger. This study shows that the exploited Energy Recovery devices (ERDs) have a very favorable economic and energetic profitability of 75% reduction, which reduces the specific power consumption by 5 instead of 14.5 kWh/m3 in the case of a system without and with the ERDs, for productivity of 800 m3/d and a recovery rate of 20%.