One week in Creta - day devoted to PV power

Today we close one week since the system reached the laboratory where we are placed. It was a very intensive week, full of hard labour work. Andres may disagree with this, but this is the experience of an unfit person like me. We managed in one week to do lots of things concerning installation, setting up things, cleaning rooms, bringing things into place, modify tanks and pipes. Right now everything seems to be in perfect place, datalogger was installed and calibrated yesterday, solving also some problems in electronics connections.

It is 9:00 and we are waiting for the sun to go up since its still somewhat below 200 W/m2. Today the day is devoted to desalination powered by the sun and datalogging the results.

Still there are issues which are not resolved:

- For the 3rd time of operation the permeate quality we get is not satisfactory (around 680 mg/l when the maximum limit for drinking water is 500 mg/l, assuming the same relation as Brett Ibbotson was using for conductivity and TDS). As a result yesterday night we didnt flush the system with very pure water, and as a consequence the concentrate of the membranes after flushing had a concentration of 1210 mg/l. Note that the membranes are considered clean when the concentrate current is not more than 1000 mg/l.Of course the assumption for the relationship between the TDS-electrical conductivity has to be changed and be calculated for the specific seawater sample we get in chania).

- Second issue is that the power cable of the pearson motor has a copper ring end which doesnt fit from the opening of the fusebox (when powered by the PVs). For the time being, Andres has used a piece of a copper raw cable to extend the original power cable, in order to manage to connect it in the fuse box. However, we are not sure if this can give more resistance, and influence the calibration to the datalogger (when measuring the voltage and the current of the motor).

Sun is rising higher, i will post more at the end of the day :)