Renewable Energy Powered Membrane Technology: Energy Buffering Control to Reduce Shut‐Down Events and Enhance System Resilience under Different Solar Days

Fluctuating and intermittent solar energy cause shut-down and reduce resilience of photovoltaic powered membrane (PV-membrane) systems. A charge controller based on pre-set voltage thresholds for supercapacitors (SC) is designed and employed on varied solar days to cope with these issues. Several parameters—number of shut-down events (#SD), shut-down duration (tSD) and resilience factor in flux (RFflux)—are quantified. The controller reduces tSD by 37% (partly cloudy) and 12% (very cloudy), and #SD by 2 and 13 events, respectively. During the 90 min fluctuations, tSD is shortened to 1–4.5 min and #SD is reduced by 1–4 events for feed water salinities of ≤7.5 g L−1. Increasing the PV power capacity to 600–1000 W, zero #SD occurs and RFflux rises from 0.3 to 0.8, indicating enhanced system resilience.