ABSTRACT
Researches are rare in open literatures about tidal energy coupling with SWRO. In previous studies, our research team theoretically studied the feasibility of direct coupled tidal energy and seawater reverse osmosis (DCTE-SWRO) systems (Ling et al., 2015). Later, we compared the system performances and water cost of conventional and DCTE-SWRO systems (Ling et al., 2018b). Tidal supercharger is an important device of DCTESWRO systems which mainly consist of three
1 INTRODUCTION
The fresh water crisis is becoming a very serious challenge around the world with the fast growth of global economy and population. Seawater desalination offers an effective way to deal with this problem and has achieved great successes in some coastal areas with an advanced economy and a large population. However, seawater desalination comes with high-energy consumption. Reverse osmosis (RO) is the most energy efficient technology for seawater desalination at industrial scale which relies on electricity generated by fossil fuel. Although good properties semi-permeable membranes, high efficiency pumps and energy recovery devices have been used, the cost of energy still up to 32% of total cost for the RO seawater desalination process (Gude, 2016). As the demand of seawater desalination increases to meet the fresh water requirement, consuming large proportion of fossil fuels may result in environment problems.
