Heat recovery from sulfuric acid plants for seawater desalination using RO and MED systems

Conforming to the factor characteristics of electricity–water cogeneration power plants, an improved multieffect desalination (MED) and reverse osmosis (RO) are the most current techniques for seawater desalination. A principal change between these operations consists of their various energy requirements, thermal energy for MED and mechanical energy for RO plants. The main improvement ideas of RO and MED are the recovery of large quantities of heat produced during the production of sulfuric acid, which exhibits an exothermic reaction where a part of this heat will be used for the thermal power plant and subsequently reverse osmosis and another amount of heat recovery system will be used to desalinate seawater by the MED system. In this work, the sulfuric acid is used to recover heat energy; this energy is used in a hybrid system of RO–MED in order to desalinate the seawater. A thermodynamic steady-state study of this system is investigated to select the optimum cogeneration system. These improvements could make the benefits of cogeneration to the energy consumption of an RO and MED which will be remarkably reduced.