In recent years, thermal energy storage (TES) systems using phase change materials (PCM) have been widely studied and developed to be applied as solar energy storage units for residential heating and cooling. These systems performance is based on the latent heat due to PCM phase change, a high...

Thermal energy storage systems which keep warm and cold water separated by means of gravitational stratification have been found to be attractive in low and medium temperature thermal storage applications due to their simplicity and low cost. This effect is known as thermal stratification, and...

Multi-objective optimization (MOO) is increasingly being used in a wide variety of applications to identify alternatives that balance several criteria. The energy sector is not an exception to this trend. Unfortunately, the complexity of MOO grows with the number of environmental objectives....

This paper addresses the optimal design of desalination plants that integrate reverse osmosis, a Rankine cycle, parabolic trough solar collectors and thermal energy storage (TES). A multi-objective mixed-integer nonlinear programming model (MINLP) is developed to model such an integrated system...