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. For these systems to be practical, they must be both technically and economically feasible. This paper presents a research program that is focused on improving the feasibility of PVRO systems. As the first step in this program, a methodology to evaluate the economic feasibility was developed. The results, reviewed here, show that the economic feasibility is a strong function of location. The results also show that increasing the efficiency of PVRO systems can extend their feasibility to currently marginal or unfeasible locations. A focus of this research program is the development of smart control algorithms to increase system efficiency and improve feasibility. This paper presents PVRO system models which have been developed to evaluate the smart control algorithms. These models are verified using an experimental system also described here. Early experimental results are presented that show good agreement with the analytical models.