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饮用水，预计到2030年，世界上多达40%的人口将面临水资源短缺。由于经历最严重缺水的国家和那些拥有最高太阳能潜力的国家之间存在直接关联，近几十年来开发了许多利用太阳能作为水净化的一次能源的技术。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严峻挑战，由于经常发布长期饮用水建议，许多社区每天都依赖瓶装水。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，同时也面临着联邦政府要求实现温室气体目标的压力。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的联系相关的技术，这些技术将分别有助于政府、学术界和私营部门指导政策制定，为科学研究提供信息，并提供潜在的商业化途径。首先，这项研究将针对加拿大的问题，但着眼于全球影响，特别是在与加拿大相似的气候条件下。未来五年的研究计划将专注于在太阳能热辅助多效蒸馏净水系统(Solar-MEDS)的设计和优化方面取得新的突破。这些系统在低温下运行，并利用多个水箱在低于大气压力的情况下蒸发非饮用水，以生产淡水。正在解决的短期目标涉及在阳光充足的炎热干旱气候中转换太阳能MED的有效性，以便改善它们在世界其他偏远和不太有利的气候地区的性能，并确定提高系统性能和降低成本的循证方法。建议的系统将包括新的特点，如优化的蒸馏罐换热器设计，吸收热泵水侧节能器，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的潜热储热罐和光伏电池系统，以使系统能够在离网环境中延长运行时间。整个拟议的系统设计将通过开发经过验证的数值模型进行评估。免费的目标是培训一组HQP了解和建模实用的、多设备的混合能源系统，因为这些技能将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.