Uncertainty Covered Techno-Enviro-Economic Viability Evaluation of a Solar Still Water Desalination Unit Using Monte Carlo Approach

Saba Sedayevatan, Armida Bahrami, Fatemeh Delfani and Ali Sohani ()
Additional contact information
Saba Sedayevatan: Faculty of Mechanical Engineering-Energy Division, K.N. Toosi University of Technology, No. 15–19, Pardis St., Mollasadra Ave., Vanak Sq., P.O. Box 19395-1999, Tehran 1999 143344, Iran
Armida Bahrami: Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Holmes Hall, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA
Fatemeh Delfani: Department of Applied Mathematics, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL 60616, USA
Ali Sohani: Department of Enterprise Engineering, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Via Del Politecnico 1, 00133 Rome, Italy

Energies, 2023, vol. 16, issue 19, 1-13

Abstract: Due to much lower initial and operating costs, as well as a great environmental and energy performance, there has been a growing tendency towards the application of solar still desalination systems to deal with water scarcity issues. By taking advantage of higher investments and providing incentives to policy makers, the application could be even broader. In order to convince the policy makers and investors, it is important to provide a clear and realistic overview of the technical, economic, and environmental viability of solar stills, and several studies have evaluated them from different viewpoints. Nonetheless, the economic and environmental factors have uncertainties, which have not been taken into account. Therefore, this study uses the Monte Carlo approach to consider the effects of the uncertainty of inflation and discount rates, in addition to emission factors, on the system’s techno-enviro-economic viability. The study is performed by covering cost per liter (CPL) and the annual saving of CO 2 (SCO 2 ) as the most important key techno-economic and environmental indicators of the system. The results show that the best probability distribution functions for inflation, discount, and emission factors are normal, log-normal, and their summation, respectively. Furthermore, both SCO 2 and CPL are found to have considerable uncertainty. The former has a variation ranging from 317.7 to 427.9 g, while the corresponding values for the latter are 0.0212 to 0.0270 $ · L −1 , respectively. With the amounts of 0.1716 and 0.1727, the values of 378.9 g and 0.0245 $ · L −1 are the values with the highest chance of occurrence for SCO 2 , as well as for CPL, respectively.

Keywords: uncertainty assessment; solar still water treatment technology; Monte Carlo methodology; techno-enviro-economic viability evaluation; renewable energy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/16/19/6924/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/16/19/6924/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:16:y:2023:i:19:p:6924-:d:1252485

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().