Abstract—The reject of the reverse osmosis water treatment
process (aka brine, concentrate, ROC) is a mixture of salts that
are dissolved in high salinity water. The ROC is classified as an
industrial waste by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
and can face regulatory limitations on disposal. State-of-the-art
of ROC disposal includes deep-well injection, surface discharge
to rivers, discharge to the ocean, and evaporation ponds. In this
study, the feasibility of using Reverse Osmosis Concentrate as a
low-cost Thermal Energy Storage (TES) medium is explored by
a techno-economic analysis. The normalized cost of TES (cost
per unit volume of stored thermal energy) is estimated through
a series of cost analyses and is compared to the cost targets of
the U.S. Department of Energy for low-cost thermal energy
storage. It was shown that the normalized cost of TES using
ROC salt content is in the range of $6.11 to $8.73 depending on
ROC processing methods.
Index Terms—Reverse osmosis concentrate, thermal energy
storage, repurposing, renewable energy.
Reza Baghaei Lakeh, Christopher Salerno, Ega P. Herlim, and Joseph
Kiriakos are with the Department of Mechanical Engineering, California
State Polytechnic University, Pomona, CA, USA (e-mail: rblakeh@cpp.edu).
Saied Delagah is with the Bureau of Reclamation, Department of Interior,
Denver, CO, USA.
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Cite:Reza Baghaei Lakeh, Christopher Salerno, Ega P. Herlim, Joseph Kiriakos, and Saied Delagah, "Repurposing Reverse Osmosis Concentrate as a Low-Cost Thermal Energy Storage Medium," Journal of Clean Energy Technologies vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 31-40, 2020.
