Thursday, September 23, 2010

Manual control of the high pressure pump.. is not a good practice?


While being in Delft, we were thinking that the more simplified the system the better would be. For this reason, we decided not to put any electronics or controllers to control the high pressure pump (Pearson pump).
However, after 4 days of full operation, it is obvious that the manual control of the pump is not the best practice.

The Pink line is the feed flow over time and the blue line is the irradiation over time, for two different days
The Pearson pump is powered by the PVs, which means that during the day, the pump has to be regulated manually depending on the fluctuations (clouds passing). Initially i thought that this wouldn't be very difficult, however because of the season's high sun fluctuations, its very difficult to  achieve the maximum flowrate for each instant irradiance. As a result, the operation of the motor is not optimised, and the total permeate production over the day is lower.

Maybe it would be a consideration to insert an automation system for the pearson pump, which will allow it to follow the fluctuations of the sun more accurately?

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