Abstract
In Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, cogeneration-based desalination processes consume almost 25% of the total annual energy, and this number increases annually by 2.2%. The high demand for fresh water can be attributed to the high gross domestic product growth rate, 24%, and high water languishes, which are more than 10%. Over the past two decades, GCC countries have spent tens of billions of dollars to expand their present and planned desalination capacities. It is foreseeable that with a business-as-usual scenario, the domestic oil consumption of Saudi Arabia may exceed its production capacity by 2040. Innovative and sustainable water production solutions are urgently needed for future water supplies without an environment impact. In this paper, a hybrid desalination cycle is proposed by integrating a cascade evaporator (CE) system with an adsorption (AD) cycle. In this new innovative cycle, desorbed vapors from the AD are supplied to the CE to exploit the latent condensation energy within the evaporators arranged in both pressure and temperature cascades to improve the performance ratio of the cycle. Water production is improved more than tenfold with the hybrid cycle relative to that observed for the conventional AD cycle owing to a synergetic effect. This concept is demonstrated in a laboratory pilot plant with a cascade of three evaporators and simulation of eight evaporators.