Design of a two stage Organic Rankine Cycle system for reverse osmosis desalination supplied from a steady thermal source

The present work concerns the design of a two-stage Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) for RO desalination exploiting a thermal source of steady heat flow supply. Aiming at improving the efficiency of the single stage low temperature (in the range of 70-80 °C) Organic Rankine Cycle for RO desalination, a high temperature (in the order of 130 °C) stage is added. The basic principle of operation is that the heat extracted from the condensation of the high temperature stage (e.g. upper stage), evaporates the refrigerant of the low temperature stage (e.g. lower stage), thus increasing significantly the overall efficiency. In comparison with the two-stage Solar Organic Rankine Cycle (SORC) that was developed and designed in a previous work, waste heat is considered as a steady thermal source in this study, in order to identify the desalinating limits of the proposed system. It is expected the quantity of fresh water to increase significantly with the incorporation of a constant heat flow, as well as the efficiency of the system, since it operates almost constantly at full load the whole day long. The system design was done with the aid of TRNSYS V16.0 software.