Transient Exergy Analysis for Solar Desalination Processes
An investigation of the transient entropy property term, entropy storage, for a desalination device was performed. It was illustrated that entropy production rates provide a means of comparing alternative energy solutions and a measure of their sustainability. To satisfy these objectives one needs accurate calculation of entropy production rates. It was confirmed that neglecting the exergy storage term is not a valid approximation for the hourly and daily averaged values of the second law analysis. For a solar desalination system neglecting the exergy storage terms introduced a maximum difference in the entropy production rate of 7.4% and a difference of 7.3% in the daily average. In the solar desalination process with heat recovery the second law performance is greater than that for the reverse osmosis process, the chief competitor, when the exergy storage terms are correctly included in the analysis. The results demonstrate that for variable energy sources such as renewable energy systems, the second law analysis provides a measure of the sustainability of competing system and that the exergy storage terms should be included in the analysis.