Multi Effect Distillation (MED) and Reverse Osmosis (RO) processes have been extensively used to produce freshwater from seawater resources. amongst many performance indicators, energy consumption of different configuration of hybrid system of MED and RO processes have been analysed in the past. Hybrid MED-RO system is energy intensive and use of fossil fuel can significantly increase the carbon footprint, unless stable renewable energy sources are used. In this work specific energy consumption of a simple hybrid MED-RO system with permeate reprocessing is minimised while optimising a number of operating decision variables using model based optimisation technique. A detailed process model developed earlier by the authors is embedded in the optimisation framework resulting in a constrained Non-linear Programming (NLP) problem. The minimum specific energy consumption achieved in this work is about 18% lower than what is reported in the literature resulting in a significant energy saving and thus carbon footprint.

多效蒸馏（MED）和反渗透（RO）工艺已被广泛用于从海水资源中生产淡水。在众多性能指标中，过去已经对MED和RO工艺混合系统的不同配置的能耗进行了分析。混合MED-RO系统耗能高，除非使用稳定的可再生能源，否则使用化石燃料会显着增加碳足迹。在这项工作中，使用基于模型的优化技术在优化多个运行决策变量的同时，将具有渗透物后处理的简单混合MED-RO系统的单位能耗降至最低。作者先前开发的详细过程模型被嵌入优化框架中，从而导致约束非线性规划（NLP）问题。