Performance of different HDH desalination units powered by diesel engine generator waste heat

Diesel generators used for off-grid power generation and other applications waste a significant amount of input power as heat (about 65%), contributing to global warming. To mitigate this, waste heat recovery and utilization systems can be employed. The current study, focuses on utilizing waste heat from a 2.5 MW diesel generator for freshwater production through integrated humidification dehumidification (HDH) systems. Four different HDH system layouts are investigated, considering factors such as dehumidifier and humidifier effectiveness, temperature differentials, mass flowrate ratio, and ambient temperature. The aim is to analyze and optimize the system's pure water productivity, recovery ratio, specific entropy generation, and gained output ratio. The results show that the layout featuring an air heated – air heated cycle (AH-AH) performs the best, with the highest productivity and gained output ratio of 234.48 m³/day and 3.01, respectively. On the other hand, the water heated – water heated cycle (WH-WH) layout exhibits lower performance. The study demonstrates the potential to recover 46–70% of the waste heat, significantly improving the diesel engine's utilization factor from 36% to 68%. The proposed system also proves cost-effective, with freshwater production costing as low as 0.62 $/m³ when utilizing waste heat, compared to 4.11 $/m³ and 13.96 $/m³ when using steam or electric heating elements. Furthermore, the integrated system helps reduce the environmental impact by minimizing waste heat discharge into the environment and thus contributes to mitigating global warming.