A Novel Effluent Evaporation System for Industrial Applications
Abstract
This paper presents the design, working principle, and field performance data of a novel effluent/brine evaporation system developed and commercialised by Quadsun solar solutions, India. The developed evaporator aims to address the challenges with existing evaporation technologies to reduce the land area requirement and heat consumption for brine evaporation while minimising the system operational cost. The developed evaporator system works on a data-driven control strategy where the effect of constraints on the evaporation rate is non-linear, and the objective function is set to minimise the electricity consumption of the system. The optimisation of the evaporation rate in the system control volume is achieved by variation of a) mass flow rate of brine, b) wind speed over the evaporation surface and c) contact area between brine and air. The system performance results are presented for an installed site located in Northern India for a testing period of 64 days. The results are further compared with a solar pond evaporation system using an analytical model. The result shows that the proposed evaporator has an average specific evaporation rate (SER) of 0.48 L/(h⋅m2), which is 3.8 times higher compared to SER for the solar pond for the same meteorological conditions. Furthermore, the compactness of the proposed evaporator design results in significant land savings compared to the pond evaporation system.