In the coming years, numerous regions are expected to suffer from water scarcity. One of the technologies of great interest in facing this challenge has been the generation of freshwater through water desalination, a process that reduces the amount of salt and minerals to a standard level, making the water suitable for drinking or agricultural/industrial use. The efficiency of each desalination process depends on the concentration of salts in the raw water and the end-use of the produced water. The present study presents the exergetic and exergoeconomic analyses of the coupling of a power plant with desalination units for the simultaneous generation of energy and water in Iran. The plant is integrated, first, with a multi-stage flash (MSF) unit and, then, with a multi-effect desalination (MED) unit. We find that the cost of exergy destruction of the MED and MSF integrated plants is lower when compared to the standalone power plant by about 0.1% and 9.2%, respectively. Lastly, the freshwater production in the plant using MED is significantly higher than that in the plant with MSF (1,000 versus 1,521 kg/s).

在未来几年中，预计许多地区将遭受缺水之苦。应对这一挑战最受关注的技术之一是通过水脱盐产生淡水，该过程可将盐和矿物质的含量降低至标准水平，从而使水适合饮用或用于农业/工业用途。每个脱盐过程的效率取决于原水中盐的浓度和产出水的最终用途。本研究提出了在伊朗同时利用发电厂和海水淡化装置进行联产的能量和能效分析。该工厂首先集成了多级闪蒸（MSF）单元，然后集成了多效脱盐（MED）单元。我们发现，与独立发电厂相比，MED和MSF集成发电厂的火用破坏成本分别降低了约0.1％和9.2％。最后，使用MED的工厂中的淡水产量显着高于使用MSF的工厂中的淡水产量（1,000对1,521 kg / s）。