Abstract
Limited access to freshwater with an increased demand for water and power has raised concerns about energy and water production advancements. Multi-effect desalination (MED) integrated with a suitable power cycle is highly desirable for waste heat recovery this paper examines a thermodynamic model for a gas turbine combined with an inverse gas turbine integrated with MED. The gas turbine's exhaust gas heat is used as a heat source in a heat exchanger to preheat the seawater, furthermore, the desalination plant's pumps consume part of the power generated by the gas turbine. In this work, we calculate the cycle performance with a variety of ambient temperatures using the IPSEpro software. The results showed significant improvement when using the combined cycle over the simple cycle, we also found that the temperature of the exhaust gas from the gas turbine is significantly reduced. By increasing the ambient temperature from 15 to 45 0C, the multi effect desilation (MED) plant water production has increased from 20,326 cubic meters per day to 21,120 cubic meters per day. Economic analyses of the MED plant integrated with the gas turbine and inverse gas turbine were performed based on the Annualized Cost of System method. This study shows that this integrated system is economical as the electric and steam costs are saved. The price for freshwater has been determined at 0.94 US$ per cubic meter.