A new stable solar system for electricity, cooling, heating, and potable water production in sunny coastal areas

Abstract

Nowadays, more attention is paid to provide clean energy products with low environmental pollution in a decentralized way. Many coastal rural areas suffer from freshwater and electricity scarcity, especially in hot weather condition. Meanwhile, these regions have a great access to intense solar radiation and seawater. Hence, it seems logical to use the available solar energy in those places to provide to necessities like power, heating, and cooling. A new solar cooling, power, heating, and freshwater production system is designed, evaluated, and optimized in this research. The proposed system is composed of several subsystems to generate each product with high efficiency and reliability. Solar energy is unavailable at night, so molten salt energy storage is used to establish the steady operation of the system. Then, the system is evaluated from thermodynamic and exergoeconomic viewpoints, and a parametric study is accomplished to study the effect on the system performance of key variables. In the end, the system is optimized to determine its best operating condition for different cases. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.