Development and field testing of stand-alone solar thermal energy conversion systems for remote community applications

大约有11亿人无法获得清洁的饮用水，预计到2030年，世界上高达40%的人口将面临水资源短缺。由于缺水最严重的国家与太阳能潜力最大的国家之间存在直接关联，近几十年来开发了一些利用太阳能热能作为水净化主要能源的技术。总体而言，加拿大并不缺水，但偏远的土著社区在获得清洁饮用水方面往往面临着深刻的挑战，由于经常出现长期的饮用水建议，许多人每天都依赖瓶装水。这些社区高度依赖昂贵的化石燃料作为能源供应，这些燃料可以用来提供高质量的水，同时也受到联邦政府要求达到温室气体排放目标的压力。在此背景下，作为拟议研究计划的动机，长期目标是探索和推进与解决水质，能源使用和温室气体排放问题相关的技术，这些技术将分别对政府，学术界和私营部门有用，以指导政策制定，为科学探究提供信息，并为商业化提供潜在途径。首先，这项研究将针对加拿大的问题，但要关注全球影响，特别是在与加拿大类似的气候条件下。这项研究计划的未来五年将集中在太阳能热辅助多效蒸馏水净化系统（solar- med）的设计和优化方面开辟新的领域。这些系统在低温下运行，并利用多个水箱在亚大气压力下蒸发非饮用水以生产淡水。正在解决的短期目标涉及太阳能MED在阳光充足的炎热干旱气候中的有效性转化，以改善其在世界上其他偏远和不利气候地区的性能，并确定以证据为基础的方法来提高系统性能和降低成本。该系统将包括一些新特性，如优化的蒸馏罐热交换器设计，吸收式热泵水侧省煤器，以及配备减压阀的级联蒸汽回路，以最大限度地提高蒸馏效率。该系统还将包括一个新型的潜热储热罐和光伏电池系统，以扩展系统在离网环境中的运行。完整的系统设计方案将通过开发一个经过验证的数值模型进行评估。该课程的目标是培养一批HQP，使他们能够理解和建模实用的、多设备的、混合能源系统，因为这些技能是加拿大向可持续社会过渡的一部分。

Roughly 1.1 billion people lack access to clean drinking water, and it is expected that up to 40% of the world's population will face water shortages by 2030. Due to a direct correlation between countries experiencing the highest levels of water scarcity and those that have the highest solar potential, a number of technologies have been developed over recent decades that utilize solar thermal energy as a primary energy source for water purification. Overall, Canada does not have a water shortage, but remote Indigenous communities often face profound challenges in accessing clean drinking water and many depend on bottled water on a daily basis due to frequent long-term drinking water advisories. These communities are highly reliant on expensive fossil fuel as their energy supply, which could be used to provide high quality water, while also being under pressure from the federal government to meet GHG targets. With this background as the motivation for the proposed research program, the long-term objective is to explore and advance the technologies associated with addressing the nexus of problems of water quality, energy use, and GHG emissions that will be useful to government, academia, and the private sector for guiding policy development, informing scientific inquiry, and providing potential pathways for commercialization, respectively. In the first instance, this research will be directed to the problems in Canada, but with an eye on global impact, especially in climates similar to Canada's. The next five years of this research program will focus on breaking new ground in the design and optimization of solar thermal assisted multi-effect distillation water purification systems (solar-MEDs). These systems operate at low temperature and make use of multiple tanks for evaporating non-potable feed water at sub-atmospheric pressures to produce fresh water. The shorter-term objectives being addressed relate to the translation of the solar MED's effectiveness in hot arid climates where sunlight is abundant, in order to improve their performance in other remote and less favorable climate regions of the world, and identifying evidence-based approaches for increasing system performance and reducing cost. The proposed system will comprise novel features such as an optimized distillation tank heat exchanger design, and absorption heat pump waterside economizer, and a cascading vapor circuit fitted with pressure reducing valves to maximize distillation efficiency. The system will additionally include a novel latent heat thermal storage tank, and photovoltaic-battery system to enable extended system operation in off-grid environments. The full proposed system design will be assessed via the development of a validated numerical model. The complimentary goal is to train a group of HQP in the understanding and modeling of practical, multi-device, hybrid energy systems, as these skills will be needed as part of Canada's transition to a sustainable society.