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Research and development of desalination technologies are becoming highly critical because of the rapid increase in freshwater demand. Researchers are continually working on improving the existing desalination technologies and exploring new methods and ideas to desalinate salty water. The main goal is to come up with cost-effective systems. Renewable energy desalination is becoming an attractive option nowadays because of its viability of producing fresh water, technology improvement continuation, limitation of conventional sources and compatibility between water needs and renewable resources availability. More importantly, using renewable energy to power desalination systems is extremely important for reducing global emissions and protecting the environment. This research is an attempt to provide a systematic methodology for determining the most cost-effective combination of renewable energy powered reverse osmosis desalination system for a given location and required capacity. Two combinations are compared which are RO-Wind and RO-PV. Results show that for Dhahran, Saudi Arabia cost of water produced by RO-Wind is 1.366 $/m³ to 1.273 $/m³ and by RO-PV is 2.119 $/m³ to 2.048 $/m³ for a system capacity of 1000 m³ to 10,000 m3, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to investigate water extraction process from a solar cooling system using a vapor absorption chiller under variable fresh air ratios. The system consists of an evacuated tube solar collector, lithium bromide absorption chiller and a fan coil unit (FCU). A parametric study is carried out to investigate the effects of flow rate of the fluid in the collector, solar insolation, fresh air volume ratio, temperature and humidity on the system performance and rate of water production. The operating conditions for the best performance are identified in this work. The results showed maximum collector efficiency of 0.66 at an optimum flow rate of the collector fluid of 0.3 kg/s at A c = 28 m 2 , T f = 45 °C, I = 800 W/m 2 and R = 50%. For the same conditions, useful energy to the generator was found to be 14.8 kW and water production rate was 8 L/h. Using the climate data of a typical day of August for Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, the findings indicated that the chiller COP and water production rate, respectively, reached maximum (0.73 and 6.6 L/h) at noon when the incident solar flux is peak (935 W/m 2 ) for 45% fresh air volume ratio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]