Effective energy management by combining gas turbine cycles and forward osmosis desalination process

In the recent years, attempts to improve the thermal efficiency of the gas turbine cycles have been made. In order to enhance the energy management of the gas turbine cycle, a new integration concept has been proposed; integration of gas turbine cycle and forward osmosis desalination process. The combination of the gas turbine cycle and the forward osmosis (FO) desalination process basically implies the coupling of the waste heat from the gas turbine cycle to the draw solute recovery system in the FO process which is the most energy consuming part of the whole FO process. By doing this, a strong system that is capable of producing water and electricity with very little waste heat can be achieved. The feasibility of this newly proposed system was analyzed using UNISIM program and the OLI property package. For the analysis, the thermolytic draw solutes which has been suggested by other research groups have been selected and studied. Sensitivity analysis was conducted on the integration system in order to understand and identify the key parameters of the integrated system. And the integrated system was further evaluated by comparing the gain output ratio (GOR) values with the conventional desalination technologies such as multi stage flash (MSF) and multi effect distillation (MED). The suggested integrated system was calculated to have a GOR of 14.8, while the MSF and MED when integrated to the gas turbine cycle showed GOR value of 12. It should also be noted that the energy utilization of the suggested integrated system is significantly higher by 27.1% and 63.8% than those of the MSF–gas turbine and MED–gas turbine systems, respectively. The noticeable enhancement in both the GOR and waste heat utilization of the suggested system resulted in 3.5 times higher water production rate than the MSF integrated system.