Investigating the Impact of Cell Inclination on Phase Change Material Melting in Square Cells: A Numerical Study.

In order to determine the ideal degree of inclination that should be employed for constructing effective thermal energy storage systems, it is important to examine the impact of inclination angle on the melting behavior of phase change materials (PCMs) such as paraffin wax within a square cell. In consequence, this would guarantee the greatest capacity for energy release and storage. Additionally, analyzing this influence aids engineers in creating systems that enhance heat flow from external sources to the PCM and vice versa. To find out how the cell's inclination angle affects the melting of PCM of paraffin wax (RT42) inside a square cell, a numerical analysis is carried out using the ANSYS/FLUENT 16 software. Specifically, the temperature and velocity distributions, together with the evolution of the melting process, will be shown for various inclination angles, and a thorough comparison will be made to assess the influence of inclination angle on the PCM melting process and its completion. The findings demonstrated that when the cell's inclination angle increased from 0° to 15° and from 0° to 30° and 45°, respectively, the amount of time required to finish the melting process increased by 15%, 42%, and 71%, respectively. Additionally, after 210 min of operation, the PCM's maximum temperature is 351.5 K with a 0° angle of inclination (horizontal) against 332.5 K with an angle of inclination of 45°.

Impact of SWMM Fouling and Position on the Performance of SWRO Systems in Operating Conditions of Minimum SEC.

Due to water stress in the world in general desalination technologies are becoming increasingly important. Among the available technologies, reverse osmosis (RO) is the most widespread due to its reliability and efficiency compared to other technologies. The main weakness of RO is the loss of performance due to membrane fouling, which usually affects the water permeability coefficient (A), causing it to decrease. In RO desalination plants, fouling does not affect all spiral wound membrane modules (SWMMs) in the pressure vessels (PVs) in the same way. This will depend on the type of fouling and the position of the SWMM inside the PV. In this study, the impact of A and the position of the SWMM on the performance of the RO system is analyzed. For this purpose, decrements of up to 50% have been assumed for the seven SWMMs in series considering nine commercial SWMM models. The operating point analyzed is that which minimizes the specific energy consumption (SEC), a point obtained in a previous work carried out by the authors. The results show how the impact of A on the SWMM in the first position is more significant than the impact on modules that are in another position for the nine SWRO models studied. A drop of 50% in the coefficient A of the first element produces a permeate loss in the pressure pipe between 0.67 and 1.35 m3 d-1. Furthermore, it was observed that the models with the lowest coefficient A exhibited the highest performance losses in terms of permeate production when A was decreased.

Model Based Simulation and Genetic Algorithm Based Optimisation of Spiral Wound Membrane RO Process for Improved Dimethylphenol Rejection from Wastewater.

Reverse Osmosis (RO) has already proved its worth as an efficient treatment method in chemical and environmental engineering applications. Various successful RO attempts for the rejection of organic and highly toxic pollutants from wastewater can be found in the literature over the last decade. Dimethylphenol is classified as a high-toxic organic compound found ubiquitously in wastewater. It poses a real threat to humans and the environment even at low concentration. In this paper, a model based framework was developed for the simulation and optimisation of RO process for the removal of dimethylphenol from wastewater. We incorporated our earlier developed and validated process model into the Species Conserving Genetic Algorithm (SCGA) based optimisation framework to optimise the design and operational parameters of the process. To provide a deeper insight of the process to the readers, the influences of membrane design parameters on dimethylphenol rejection, water recovery rate and the level of specific energy consumption of the process for two different sets of operating conditions are presented first which were achieved via simulation. The membrane parameters taken into consideration include membrane length, width and feed channel height. Finally, a multi-objective function is presented to optimise the membrane design parameters, dimethylphenol rejection and required energy consumption. Simulation results affirmed insignificant and significant impacts of membrane length and width on dimethylphenol rejection and specific energy consumption, respectively. However, these performance indicators are negatively influenced due to increasing the feed channel height. On the other hand, optimisation results generated an optimum removal of dimethylphenol at reduced specific energy consumption for a wide sets of inlet conditions. More importantly, the dimethylphenol rejection increased by around 2.51% to 98.72% compared to ordinary RO module measurements with a saving of around 20.6% of specific energy consumption.

Thermodynamic Limitations and Exergy Analysis of Brackish Water Reverse Osmosis Desalination Process.

The reverse osmosis (RO) process is one of the most popular membrane technologies for the generation of freshwater from seawater and brackish water resources. An industrial scale RO desalination consumes a considerable amount of energy due to the exergy destruction in several units of the process. To mitigate these limitations, several colleagues focused on delivering feasible options to resolve these issues. Most importantly, the intention was to specify the most units responsible for dissipating energy. However, in the literature, no research has been done on the analysis of exergy losses and thermodynamic limitations of the RO system of the Arab Potash Company (APC). Specifically, the RO system of the APC is designed as a medium-sized, multistage, multi pass spiral wound brackish water RO desalination plant with a capacity of 1200 m3/day. Therefore, this paper intends to fill this gap and critically investigate the distribution of exergy destruction by incorporating both physical and chemical exergies of several units and compartments of the RO system. To carry out this study, a sub-model of exergy analysis was collected from the open literature and embedded into the original RO model developed by the authors of this study. The simulation results explored the most sections that cause the highest energy destruction. Specifically, it is confirmed that the major exergy destruction happens in the product stream with 95.8% of the total exergy input. However, the lowest exergy destruction happens in the mixing location of permeate of the first pass of RO desalination system with 62.28% of the total exergy input.

Evaluation of phenol removal via a spiral wound reverse osmosis process with different feed concentrations: simulation study.

Reverse osmosis (RO) process is progressively engaged in various industrial applications as a promising separation process in favour of classical methods. In this study, an earlier one-dimensional distributed model of RO process, developed by the author, is used to simulate the transport phenomena of phenol removal. The proposed model represented the process parameters as a function of longitudinal variation along the x-coordinate of feed side. The transport parameters of the membrane are optimised by the gEST parameter estimation tool of gPROMS. The model is verified against phenol removal experimental data for a pilot-scale spiral wound RO (SWRO) treatment system. The model has been used to explore the effects of key operating parameters on the phenol removal for five feed concentration cases.