Integrated Renewable Energy-Driven Innovative Desalination Technologies

It is essential to use alternative energy, mainly solar, sources to meet the growing demand for desalination and being environmentally friendly. Most solar driven plants are connected to the grid because the exxisting desalination technologies require continuous energy supply for stable operation, which cannot be assured by solar energy alone. In this paper, innovative desalination technologies, mainly adsorption desalination (AD) and membrane distillation (MD), which are more suitable for integrated solar or waste heat driven desalination, are presented and compared with conventional technologies, such as PV-RO, and supported by experimental and modelling/simulation results.