Performance Investigation of The Bed Adsorption of An Adsorption Desalination Using CFD Simulation

Abstract One of the critical elements of an adsorption desalination system is the adsorption bed. System dynamics of a 2-bed single-stage silica gel plus water-based AD system was analyzed. A great pattern is expanded using energy conservation and mass connected with the kinetics of the ad- sorption/desorption process. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling was handled for simulation of the adsorption process for a rectangular finned tube-based adsorption bed featured with silica gel adsorbent substance. For the simulation, the adsorbents were considered as a solid volume with defined porosity based on Darcy equation. The adsorption and desorption mode of the adsorption bed was simulated. The CFD techniques were then applied to study fin thickness and fin height. The results showed that decreasing the fin thickness increased the water uptake by up to 8% and decreased the fin height from 30mm to 20mm, which resulted in an increase of the water uptake up to 17%. The CFD technique was also used to investigate the effect of plate type on the adsorption bed performance. The results showed that the copper plate improved the water uptake up to 9%. The copper plate decreased the temperature of the adsorption bed up to 11% more than the aluminum plate.