Systemic design of a reverse osmosis desalination process powered by hybrid energy system

In this paper, the authors investigate a systemic modeling of a small-scale Brackish Water Reverse Osmosis (BWRO) desalination unit. This unit is powered by hybrid renewable energy system (photovoltaic-wind) without battery storage. The RO desalination process includes several disciplinary fields such as mechanical, hydraulic, chemical and thermal domains. Therefore, a multidisciplinary approach is proposed in this work. The bond graph is a modeling technique well known for dynamic modeling of such a multi-physical system. An experimental characterization of a BWRO test bench is performed in order to assess the established bond graph model of the studied desalination process. The simulation results drawn from a dedicated software tool reveal significant results when compared to experimental results.