Concept exploration; Integrating atmospheric water generation systems onto spray drying process

Abstract

Water is a scarce resource in many places of the world, and the problem with access to clean water increases. There are several ways to mitigate the problem and produce clean water and one of them is atmospheric water generation (AWG). Although water is a scarce resource it occurs as a residual product from the drying process spray drying. The Uppsala based startup company Drupps has developed technology for water recovery using a liquid desiccant to absorb the residual hot fumes emitted into the atmosphere. The company has built a pilot plant in a test facility with the necessary components for the system. The purpose of the thesis was to develop a product architecture to be retrofitted on existing productions that use spray dryers. The target customers was productions with spray dryers emitting approximately 250 000 cubic meters of moisture per hour. To develop a customer focused product, the product development method is based on the one presented in the book “Product design and development” by Karl T. Ulrich and Steven D. Eppinger from 2016. The thesis elicits customer needs, mainly through interviews, searching for solutions that solve similar problems, decision matrices. The final concept design is an modular architecture, consisting of a load-carrying structure of a square cube frame with interface to enable more cubes to be connected. The majority of the components of the Drupps atmospheric water generation system fit inside the cubic frames, and by increasing and alternating the three different cubes, the system can fit a wide variety of volumetric flows as well as different potential customer segments.